National Freedom of Information Coalition
Protecting Your Right to Open Government

Tag: transparency

Oregon Legislature to adopt transparency rules in 2016

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The Oregon Legislature is set to adopt new rules that will make it easier to see how legislation is created and how the state does business.

Senate and House leaders expressed bipartisan support for the changes Tuesday during an annual meeting with press before the legislative session starts Feb. 1.

A major change in the rules is that anonymous amendments to bills will no longer be allowed. Legislators will have their names attached to amendments, and there will be an option to note if a lobbyist sponsored the amendment.

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Study recommends more police transparency in Georgia

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A Georgia public interest law center is looking for ways to improve relations between police and the communities they serve as well as drive down the number of incidents involving police officers' use of force.

The Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice is making recommendations that its leaders hope could start becoming law as early as this year.

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Editorial: Don’t mess with our Sunshine laws

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Every Floridian who cares about transparency in public affairs and about keeping government accountable to the taxpayers should be worried about the latest effort in Tallahassee to stifle the state’s public records law.

It’s a head-on frontal attack on the law, although it’s disguised as a mere word change in the existing Sunshine statute. The relevant wording states that a judge “shall” award attorneys fees when citizens win a lawsuit over a public records request that was wrongly denied. 

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Candidate for Indiana Governor proposes transparency initiative

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John Gregg, the Democratic candidate for governor, is calling for greater government transparency in a policy proposal announced Monday.

“While this governor would have created a taxpayer funded propaganda machine to control what information reporters and the public have access to, I want to throw open the doors of state government,” Gregg said in a release.

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Editorial: Agenda for Connecticut government: Restore transparency, accountability

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In 2015, the legislature passed a bill that restored much of the public access to police arrest records that had been lost in a devastating state Supreme Court decision.

That legislative action — and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's signature — amounted to a welcome (and these days rare) victory for the cause of open government.

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DCOGC welcomes DC Council bill to improve open government laws

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DC Council members David Grosso and Mary Cheh Tuesday introduced a sweeping set of measures to improve open government laws in the District of Columbia. Council member Anita Bonds also cosponsored the bill, the “Strengthening Transparency and Open Access to Government Amendment Act of 2016.”

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Making government transparency more transparent

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Public records requests have surged in recent years, thanks in large part to the transparency and open data movements.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which has been evaluating transparency in state spending for six years, reported that 2015 saw dramatic improvements in how and how much information was provided online. The same goes for cities, where the number of open data sets accessible to the public has climbed since the Open Knowledge Foundation began tracking them in 2013.

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Nebraska bill would put more state agencies on transparency site

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Nebraska lawmakers will consider a proposal next year that would place more agencies on the state's spending transparency website.

State Treasurer Don Stenberg and state Sen. John McCollister announced Tuesday that they will propose legislation that would require quasi-public agencies to submit their financial records for publication. Financial information would appear on the website, www.statespending.nebraska.gov.

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