Open Up Oregon is a new website about reforming the Oregon Public Records Law.
Bill Harbaugh, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon, contributes to the website. He also has an op-ed in the Oregonian yesterday, Open up Oregon’s public records where he persuasively argues that new attorney general John Kroger can reform the state’s law overnight by adopting five days as the state’s administrative definition of what counts as a “reasonable and proper” response time.
Posted in Oregon open records
Who supports school spending transparency in Colorado?
Posted in Colorado open records
Marsha Farmer died on Friday, December 26…the same day that the Houston Chronicle published a front-page article about her role in exposing gross waste and mismanagement as a City of Houston-run home repair program.
Marsha Farmer was a determined, persistent whistleblower and open records activist. It was significantly due to records she obtained through the use of open records laws that she was able to establish that contractors in the home repair program routinely over-billed the city for excessive materials and for work that wasn’t performed.
When Farmer told the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program of her discoveries, they initiated an investigation that led to a requirement that the city’s mismanaged program repay $15.5 million to HUD for federal grant money it spent that went nowhere.
Farmer lived in a house that was eligible for home repair under the program she exposed. Her home was flooded by Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001, leading to an aggravated mold infestation. Her attempts to get the city’s home repair program to work on the house led to her suspicion that the agency was mismanaged.
After the Houston Chronicle covered her story in December, the city program agreed to make repairs … new electrical wiring, new siding, structural repairs and new drywall in rooms affected by mold for a total estimated cost of $45,000 to $50,000. She told the paper, “I should end up with a good, strong house that’s ready for another 50 years.”
Marsha Farmer, RIP.
Posted in texas open records
Background: Private agency, public dollars.
My friend and colleague Paul Jacob was indicted in Oklahoma in June 2007 by attorney general Drew Edmondson. The charges were dropped last week because the underlying law was unconstitutional, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Two other federal appellate courts had ruled that similar laws in other states were unconstitutional last year. One might say that the laws were manifestly unconstitutional but nevertheless Edmondson persisted for eighteen months in his attempt to jail the Oklahoma 3 for up to ten years.
When the Citizens in Charge Foundation (CICF) sent out a press release to the Oklahoma media last week, announcing that the charges had been dropped, the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority — the public television station in Oklahoma — sent a “spam complaint” to Hostica, the company that hosts the CICF website, causing the website to temporarily be pulled.
I would think that getting press releases about Oklahoma-related news would be all in a day’s work for the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, and would not be something to cause someone at OETA to go to the trouble of filing a spam complaint with CICF’s server. I’d be curious to know who made that decision, and why, and how it was executed.
I can’t discern from OETA’s website whether it would be considered mostly a private corporation or, like other nominally private corporations that are primarily funded by tax dollars, whether it would be considered public in the sense of FOIAable.
Anyone out there have any experience with the question of whether state-based public television stations are considered public for FOIA purposes?
Darlene Fairley, who represents Washington’s 32nd state senate district, has proposed legislation in this legislative session to make it costlier to obtain public records.
Might I just note that Senator Fairley is out of step with the times?
Here’s a list of proposed changes to the Washington Public Records Act.
Posted in Washington open records
I notice that 67 Florida county websites are not a bright beacon of sunshine-y goodness.
Attorney General Bill McCollum has noticed the same thing (maybe he read our link above) and has issued a call for improvement, which he’d like to see happen by mid-March 2009.
McCollum mentions that counties and school districts should “immediately place on their websites the email address and phone number for their public records points of contact.”
Right now, only three counties do that: Duval, Escambia and Highlands.
The counties do better with online budgets: 47 out of 67 have budgets online.
Posted in Florida open records
Sunshine Week 2009 is March 15-21. The Sunshine Week folks have their own blog (also linked in my sidebar), which will be the place to keep up on 2009 Sunshine Week plans.
Posted in Sunshine Week
Do you know of any proposed changes to state sunshine laws in 2009? I’m sure there will be many dozens as the 50 state legislatures get down to work so please add anything to that article that you run across.
Posted in State Laws
The hope/change scenario has not taken root in Maricopa County, Arizona.
The county sheriff and the county district attorney have been filin’ up a storm of document requests with other people who also work for the county because they’re trying to investigate something.
What are they investigating? They’re investigating a county supervisor, Don Stapley and what looks–at least to the sheriff and the attorney–like lots o’ corruption.
So the County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution saying that if you work for the county, you’re no longer allowed to use the Arizona Sunshine Law to ask for records.
Just my two cents, but I agree with what the county attorney says: the new county law is illegal.
Posted in Arizona open records
The Indiana Sunshine Law might get a badly-needed upgrade courtesy of a proposed legislative reform.
A proposal making its way through the Indiana Senate could impose fines of up to $1,000 on government agencies that violate Indiana’s public access laws. The fine can also be extended to individual government employees involved in fact blocking.
But it wouldn’t be America if someone wasn’t opposed. Who would that be? For one, the Association of Indiana Counties.
Whose money is the Indiana Association of Counties using to lobby against a tougher Freedom of Information law in Indiana? The organization is funded through dues paid to it by Indiana counties who, in turn, get their money from Indiana taxpayers. So it is Indiana taxpayers who are footing the bill for the Indiana Association of Counties to lobby on this bill.
Posted in Indiana open records
