• In Georgia, Cumming Mayor Ford Gravitt removed citizen journalist Nydia Tisdale  from a recent public meeting. Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens is investigating whether Gravitt violated the state's sunshine laws. In an interview, Gravitt claimed that he was confused about the state’s Open Records Act. He thought it “only permitted people to take still pictures or video, and not both.” Check out the video of Tisdale being removed from the meeting  (around the 2:20 mark) by clicking on the image below. As she is being removed, she maintains, "This is an open and public meeting; I have a right by Georgia law to record this meeting." Ironically, this all took place on the same day that Governor Nathan Deal signed a rewrite of the state's Open Records Act into law. For more information, see Thomas Wheatly’s post on Fresh Loaf.
• After a six-year battle between open government advocates and those who opposed a new open government  bill, Iowa is getting a new state agency dedicated to enforcement of open government. The agency is meant to help solve disputes between governments and record seekers and will work as an enforcer to the state’s current open meetings laws. “The biggest benefit of having this is making sure that public records and meetings are open and available to Iowans,” said Chris Mudge, director of the Iowa Newspaper Association. For the whole story, check out Jason Clayworth’s post on the DesMoines Register.
• In 2011, more than 115 items, including  guns, drugs and money, came up  missing from the Asheville Police Department’s evidence room. Asheville City Council spent $175,000 in taxpayer money to fund an audit of the evidence room. According the the audit contract, a copy of the completed audit should have been made public to the city. The results of the audit were delivered to District Attorney Ron Moore in January. However, Moore  has ignored several open records requests and has not made the results of public. In doing so, Moore has failed to comply with state law requiring a response to open records requests “as promptly as possible.” Members of the local news media and the North Carolina Press Association are currently signing a petition to have the information made public. For the whole story, see David Forbes’ post on Mountain Xpress.
• Last week, we took a look at the aftermath of a contested mayoral election in New Mexico. The election is in the news again this week. The Doña Ana County district attorney’s office is investigating the possibility that the Sunland Park City Council violated the state's Open Meetings Act when it selected a new mayor following the election scandal. The meeting's venue was too packed to house the entire crowd. Many people – including at least two who wanted to ask for the appointment to the mayor’s job – were kept by police from entering. Though the state’s Open Meeting Act has rarely been enforced with criminal charges, it requires that anyone who tries to attend a public meeting of a government body be allowed in. For more information, see Heath Haussamen’s post on NMPoltics.
• On Tuesday, there was a public meeting in Dixon, Illinois to discuss allegation that the city comptroller embezzled $30 million dollars from the city. The meeting featured Dixon business owner and former candidate for state representative Li Arellano. Arellano focused the meeting on making city government more transparent.  A major point in the meeting was the city’s low transparency score from the Illinois Policy Institute and how the cities website failed to contain easily accessible financial information as required. According to the Illinois Policy Institute "A public posting of Dixon’s check register (expenditures) might have stopped the public corruption from happening in the first place." For Ulysses S. Arn’s take, see his post on USOFarn.

• The Salt Lake Tribune covered a  University of Utah honors class project: developing a set of five guiding principles to help local governments throughout the state increase transparency. The project’s goal is to persuade all 270-plus county and city governments in Utah to adopt their  principles to make their government more open. The projects focused on transparency in the age of the Internet. Moreover, the class itself operated in a transparent manner: “Every lecture was videotaped; every class presentation, too. Students had to comment daily on Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and blogs. Anyone who wanted could see what the Think Tank and its individual members were up to — and some students developed notable followings.” Theresa Krause, one of the participating students, maintained  "Information is the currency of democracy. It is the key to citizen engagement.  "The Internet has made data available and changed the way we think about transparency and access to government." For the whole story, check out Mike Gorell’s post on the Salt Lake Tribune.
• The week, the Maine House rejected a bill that would have exempted the governor’s working papers from the state’s Freedom of Access laws.  The bill would have also exempted some members of the governor's staff from Freedom of Access Act, at least until the end of the legislative session. They include the governor's chief of staff, legal counsel, director of policy and employees under their direct supervision. Representative Kim Monaghan-Derrig told her colleagues that she worried the bill would  hurt the state’s transparency. For more information, see Susan Sharon’s post on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. 
• In order to avoid a violation of the Massachusetts Open Meetings Law, Scituate selectmen met for a special meeting to reaffirm a vote they took to approve contracts with non-union employees. In an executive session last November, the board voted to approve the contracts, including the contract for the Town Administrator, which is a violation of the open meeting law. They reaffirmed the vote in an open session this week. Selectmen Chair Tony Vegnani addressed the issue and said, “We met this evening to address a ruling from the Town of Carver, in regards to the Open Meeting Law. In November, we accepted three non-union contracts; the Town Accountant, Town Treasurer and Town Administrator and we did it in executive session. A month later in December, a ruling of the Open Meeting Law said that contracts needed to be accepted in open session. We read it in Beacon and talked to town counsel about it and they thought it would prudent, if we actually accepted the contracts in open meeting, as opposed to executive session.” For the whole story, see John Penny’s post on 959 WATD. 
• The McPherson School building is an old Illinois building  with an incredibly rich history. The building will be on the receiving end of a million dollar infrastructure improvement project. The funds will be dispersed by the Illinois Local School Council (LSC).  According to Patrick Boylan, “Our biggest complaint about McPherson is there is a corporate culture apparent that wants secrecy.” He maintains, “The price for those public dollars should be greater transparency at McPherson. Alone, of the LSCs examined by The Bulldog, McPherson has no records available to the public. It puts hurdles up to public access and it may be responsible, in part, for the decision by CPS to restrict public access to LSC election information. That culture of mistrust must change.” He calls on the Local School Council to make their process more transparent by disclosing meeting minutes and agendas online and making meetings more inclusive to the public. For his take, check out his post on the Wells Park Bulldog. 

• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has made good on his campaign promise to increase his own transparency by launching a new website called CitizenConnect. This website provide citizens with details about his schedule and allows them to conduct online town halls with him. Jimmy Veilkind has been critical of Cuomo's transparency record in the past and sees this as a step in the right direction. Cuomo hopes the site will provide “an open forum for New Yorkers to interact and participate in their government.” Find out more on Veilkind's take on the new website at Capitol Confidential.

• According to a study done by The Sunshine Review, a nonprofit that uses a transparency checklist to evaluate state and local government websites, the state of Florida has a B grade for online transparency. Despite several Florida county websites receiving A+ grades for online transparency, the overall grade average was weighed down by the low marks given to the state website MyFlorida.com. The site earned a B due to its tough-to-navigate search function, not providing information on state-paid lobbying and agency lobbying contracts, and not providing "comprehensive information" for making public records requests. Find out more about Katie Sanders' take on Florida's ranking at the Miami Herald Naked Politics Blog.

• Cook County, Illinois just launched an online open county data catalog. For its template, Cook County used the Model Local Open Government Directive, which was designed to fill a need for open government policies  expressed at CityCamp Colorado. Bryan Gryth, Vice-President and Director of Colorado Smart Communities maintains, “Today is a good day for open government and the citizens of Cook County because they have a more transparent county government and that transparency will hopefully lead to a more informed citizenry that can hold their government accountable.” Check out Sebsatian James' take on the  campaign on the Cook County Blog.

• San Francisco's oldest municipal Sunshine Ordinance was established and extended thanks to the San Francisco Bay Guardian.  They are now reporting that enforcement of this ordinance was left to an ethics commission that simply would not discipline recalcitrant officials, thus leaving the task force powerless to give citizens the openness they have a right to. She maintains that this oversight allows government departments to lie about embarrassing public records with little impunity. See why Terry Francke describes the Sunshine Ordinance as a "cloud of inaction" at CalAware Today.

This week we continue our coverage of the rollbacks of Illinois's Freedom of Information law with a guest post from Emily Miller. Miller is the Policy and Government Affairs Coordinator at the Better Government Association, a non-profit, non-partisan government watchdog group based in Illinois that has been closely following this issue.

*** In 2010, during a whirlwind of post-Blagojevich “ethics reform,” the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) went through a dramatic rewrite that strengthened the rights of citizens to access information about their government. From tightening response deadlines and eliminating loopholes, to creating a “public access counselor” in the office of the Illinois attorney general, the new law made accessing information about Illinois government easier than ever.

But the honeymoon didn’t last long. Lawmakers began chipping away at the new FOIA protections almost as soon as the law went into effect. This year’s legislative session saw at least 12 different anti-FOIA bills move through the Illinois General Assembly.

The good news is that, by being involved in negotiations with key lawmakers and staffers, the Better Government Association (BGA) and other advocates stopped some of the more absurd FOIA backsliding suggested during the legislative session, including a provision that would have allowed public school districts to wait all summer until students returned in the fall before responding to a citizen’s FOIA request.

But now, under a new law signed last week by Gov. Pat Quinn, Illinois added yet another barrier to access by creating a new class of citizen—the “recurrent requester”—who must wait longer to receive documents requested from public bodies.

Referred to as “vexatious requesters” in earlier versions of the legislation, recurrent requesters are citizens who make more than 50 FOIA requests in one year, 15 in 30 days or seven in seven days.

Once citizens are labeled a recurrent requester—a label they cannot appeal—it’s harder for them to access public information for an entire year. The 2010 law gave public bodies five business days to respond to a request for public information, or 10 days if they get an extension. Under the new law, public bodies can take 21 days to give a recurrent requester an estimate as to when he or she might get the requested documents, and it requires no set timeline by which a public body must respond.

The lack of a set time frame for reply could leave citizen watchdogs without access to time-sensitive information that’s needed to keep a close watch on what’s behind fast-changing or shifting government decisions or plans.

Illinois should be moving toward increased openness and transparency, not away from it. Instead of focusing on ways to punish “recurrent requesters,” public bodies should be focusing on how to make public information more accessible through the Web. If more basic public information, such as meeting minutes and contracts, was available online, citizens wouldn’t need to file as many FOIAs.

Unfortunately, we know this is not the end of the fight to protect FOIA. Without a doubt, lawmakers will continue to try and chip away at FOIA.

The BGA remains committed to shining a light on government, and we will continue to fight for the public’s right to do the same.

Emily Miller is the Policy and Government Affairs Coordinator at the Better Government Association (www.bettergov.org), a non-profit non-partisan government watchdog group in Illinois. The BGA Think Tank blog follows BGA policy work, including FOIA. Emily Miller can be found on Twitter at @EJMill.

Transparency is a cornerstone of democracy: If citizens can’t see the process, they can’t be expected to be informed participants in it. In Illinois, the Citizen Advocacy Center (CAC), a renowned non-profit, non-partisan organization “dedicated to building democracy for the 21st century,” has applied this same perspective to their local and state officials’ cracks at redistricting. Today, Maryam Judar, a Community Lawyer at the CAC, shares more insight on this issue with us.

***

Redistricting and the Illinois experience are illustrative of why the people clamor for transparency, and how public officials cynically use transparency to gain advantage. The clamor is easy to explain: Fair redistricting practices drive competition at the ballot. Competition is central to our nation’s democracy: robust debate is a foundational value of our political system. A lack of competitive views reflected on the ballot reduces voters’ choices. The lack of meaningful choice on ballots is a common complaint by voters. Revised redistricting procedures that benefit the public rather than elected officials may ameliorate the public’s frustration with lack of candidate choice, and it may spur more people to vote.

These days the term “transparency” is bandied about at all levels of our government. Some of the clamor comes from the citizenry who are anxious about the activities of their governments and need a means of holding them accountable; and while some public officials jump on the transparency bandwagon and trumpet its virtues in hopes of using it as a political vehicle to gain advantage, others sincerely believe in transparency’s importance and join the discussion. Transparency, while having little-examined benefits for government officials and employees, ultimately protects the people from government mismanagement and unethical behavior. In the national and state-wide debates, the importance of transparency is best told by stories that exemplify what is at stake for all members of the public, and from the public’s perspective.

THE MOST CLOSED OPEN PROCESS

In the aftermath of former Governor Blagojevich’s indictment, elected officials could not ignore the calls for transparency during the redistricting cycle. In fact, Governor Quinn’s own Illinois Reform Commission formed in response to his predecessor’s arrest and impeachment reported the current structure of government in Illinois, including the system for drawing congressional and state legislative districts, “does not serve the best interests of the people, and instead functions to protect incumbents and concentrate political power in a handful of officials.” (Illinois Reform Commission 100-Day Report, April 28, 2009, at www.reformillinoisnow.org, p. 47.) During this redistricting cycle, for the first time the public could speak out at public hearings and even had maps that were made available for public inspection before legislators voted on them, albeit just days before their deadlines.

The outcome? Nineteen Republican representatives face elections against at least one other Republican incumbent in the redistricting map signed by Governor Pat Quinn. Democrats have acknowledged their maps result from their consideration of partisan voting data, and they confound the issue of fairness by pointing to the “most open process Illinois has ever had.”

Which, to be fair, is true, as outlined above. The bad news is their measures towards transparency can be described at best as achieving translucency -- ultimately, mapmaking decisions are made outside the public’s eye. In contrast, the Commission recommended adopting legislation to restore fairness to the process by which state legislative and congressional districts are drawn, and it specified that ideally the legislation would exclude the consideration of residency of incumbent legislators, political affiliations of registered voters, and previous election results.

Disturbingly, Governor Quinn, formerly a staunch champion of good government practices, was not troubled by the maps’ outcome. "My view is that the process for redistricting, both the congressional districts and the state legislative districts, is the most open process Illinois has ever had," Quinn said in response to the filing of the LWV lawsuit. "There was ample public participation and opportunity to participate. I looked at both maps in a very careful way and made a decision that they were fair (and) done through an open process. So we're happy to defend that work in any court in the land." (Rick Pearson, Voter group sues over Democratic-drawn districts for lawmakers, Chicago Tribune, August 16, 2011.)

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAPS BEHIND THE CURTAIN

This attitude that the public need not be privy to the actual decision-making behind the drawing of district boundaries is not limited to the State; it is mimicked wherever its false reassurances can be invoked, whether at the municipal or county level.

As in other redistricting cycles, lawsuits challenging the final maps attempt to hold accountable the Illinois state officials who are responsible for redistricting. To date, two lawsuits, now consolidated, challenge the Democratic legislation redrawing the state’s legislative and congressional district boundaries. Illinois State Republican Leaders filed a federal lawsuit to invalidate the 2011 maps and included the novel legal theory that the map violates the First Amendment of our United States Constitution by diluting the voting power of Republican voters across the state. The League of Women Voters of Illinois filed a federal lawsuit alleging that both the state legislature and congressional districts violate the First Amendment by discriminating according to a person’s political viewpoint.

Unfortunately resources are scarce to hold the local officials accountable for their redistricting behavior. A low cost method of holding officials accountable where the likelihood of an expensive lawsuit is slim is through enforcing strong transparency measures. Recently the Illinois Attorney General found that the McHenry County Board violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act by holding a closed door meeting in which five members took turns in pairs to rotate out of the room in an effort to skirt the legal definition of a meeting. (Attorney General: County Board meeting violated Open Meetings Act Kevin P. Cramer, Northwest Herald August 13, 2011.) In DuPage County, the board members practiced the safer alternative of meeting between each 3 member district and the consultant, causing piecemeal district creation and ensuing public accusations by public officials of political gerrymandering. While DuPage County’s redistricting practices did not garner a scolding Attorney General opinion, allegations of political gerrymandering pitted representatives from the same district against one another, where the whistleblower stood to lose little from revealing what he witnessed in the closed door redistricting process because he planned to run for government office in the next election cycle. The board ultimately voted in the arguably offending map,appropriately named the Fitzpatrick Finger in honor of the opposing candidate that was drawn out of the district.

The better way, and to repeat, the low cost way, to hold our state and local governments accountable for their redistricting methods is through strong transparency measures that provide meaningful rationales for the best interest of the public behind district boundaries.

The wait is over. On Friday last week, Governor Pat Quinn signed into law HB 1716, a bill that will restrict FOIA requests in Illinois. It is unfortunate that the governor chose to support a bill that clearly robs the public of their right to know about their government.

Earlier , we wrote about Illinois’ consideration of the bill and highlighted our efforts to encourage open government through our open letter and call tool campaign which prompted some positive changes in Maine  and Utah .

By choosing to punish so-called ‘recurrent requesters’ -- as this law surely will -- by delaying their requests, the governor is not only disappointing the open government advocates who thought of him as a “sunshine” sympathizer, but is also confirming the state’s reputation of going back on transparency promises. Indeed, an audit done in 2006 by the Better Government Association showed that an overwhelming 62 percent of Illinois’ government did not comply with Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, while a miserly 38 percent of public bodies were fully or substantially compliant.

Just like on the Federal level, lobbyists at state are equally if not more involvement in government legislature.

Last week, an article about Illinois’ local government use of lobbyists to fight transparency  using the public’s tax money discussed how lawmakers who usually start out as local government officials hate dealing with FOI. It goes without saying that any FOI-supporting legislation will be killed at inception by the legislators who didn’t like it in the first place (even when they had less power to do anything about it).

So it looks like FOI abuses such as the 2009 case of a taxpayer who crusaded for three and a half years and was denied information on the then-superintendent's employment contract will be the only saving grace for the state. The abuse later prompted a law reform, after the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the superintendent's records were not exempted from FOIA.

But should Illinoisans and the rest of the public wait for other glaring abuses to rear their ugly heads before Freedom of Information is taken seriously? At Sunlight, we will continue to demonstrate our support for transparency -- even as our leaders bail on us, we still can hold them accountable and prove that though they may think this particular battle is won, the fight still goes on.

We welcome Mark Cavers - our guest blogger. Mark serves as the Government Reform Policy Analyst for the Illinois Policy Institute, focusing on transparency and government reform. Today, he shares with us his organization’s venture at creating metrics for government websites that officials and citizens can agree on. He can be reached at mcavers@illinoispolicy.org.

The Illinois Policy Institute promotes transparency and accountability as a first step towards good and effective government. Last year, the Institute began using the “Ten Point Transparency Checklist” in partnership with grassroots volunteers to bring transparency best practices to local units of government. The Ten Point Transparency Checklist creates a standard for local governments and citizens to strive towards. It measures the availability of online information about: contacts for elected and administrative officials; public meetings; accessing public records using the Freedom of Information Act; budgets; audits; expenditures; employee salaries and benefits; contracts; lobbying; and taxes and fees.

Our checklist is by no means a complete list, but it is a good place to build from and very helpful for giving governments and activists a common framework to work towards. Using a simple 0 to 100% grading scale, this tool is easy to use and understand. It takes the guesswork out of transparency, puts everyone on the same page, and demonstrates to citizens and governments alike how they are performing.

As a first step, local citizens perform “transparency audits” of government websites and grade their level of openness based on the straightforward recommendations in our transparency checklist. Next, the Institute works with the citizens and the local governments to help them improve their scores by becoming more transparent.

The local government transparency audits using the Transparency Checklist have so far been successful in getting governments and citizens to work together towards clearly defined transparency goals. By auditing all the government units within a geographic region, the audits encourage local governments to compete against each other for the highest score and the recognition by their communities and the media that comes with it. We’ve seen governments improve their scores by over 30 points in 24 hours, as was the case with School District 54 in Glenview, Illinois.

For over a year, the Illinois Policy Institute has been performing local government transparency audits using the Ten Point Checklist as a grading scale. To date, we’ve performed over 130 audits on the websites of local governments ranging in size and responsibilities from park districts to villages to school districts to county government.

Recently the Illinois Policy Institute worked with the Village of Orland Park to implement the recommendations in the Checklist. Orland Park Mayor Dan McLaughlin had this to say about the opportunity:

“I commend the Illinois Policy Institute for creating a format with achievable goals that any government agency can follow.”

Transparency should not be a contentious issue, and as Mayor McLaughlin’s quote shows, it doesn’t have to be. TheTen Point Transparency Checklist is a great way to facilitate cooperation between local governments and their citizens while making measurable improvements in transparency. The Illinois Policy Institute’s aim is to help citizens across the state and country bring transparency to their local governments.

Why? Because transparency allows citizens and taxpayers to get actively involved in government, it is a powerful tool for rooting out corruption, and once we know how tax dollars are spent we can find ways to solve the budget crunches governments across the country face.

Government websites are great tools for increasing transparency. Our goal is to make these tools as useful as possible. The Illinois Policy Institute’s Ten Point Transparency Checklist  is a great way for governments and activists to work together towards improving their websites.

The fourth president of the United States, James Madison once wrote:

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Last month, we wrote about how the state of Illinois was erecting barriers to such knowledge by passing House Bill 1716. Sponsored by both House and Senate representatives, HB 1716 is an amendment bill to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which will require people who request information to pay for the actual cost of retrieving public records.

Several watchdog groups, including For the Good of Illinois , are concerned that the bill labels citizens who request information more than 50 times a year as “recurrent requestors”. This label jeopardizes their chances of actually getting the information they request, because once someone has been labeled, the government may delay fulfilling the request for up to one year!

The Citizen Advocacy Center (CAC), another vocal transparency organization in Illinois, has rallied Illinoisans asked Governor Quinn to reject HB 1716. Last week, the group met with the Governor’s legislative staff last week to express their concern about the bill. CAC has a history of fighting for the freedom of popular information: in 2009, CAC worked with the Attorney General’s Office to reform Illinois' FOIA -- turning it from one of the country’s worst FOI laws into one of the strongest.

CAC is joined in the struggle against HB 1716 by the Better Government Association, which created a take action platform calling on citizens to tell the Governor to stop the FOIA roll back bill.

The organization’s president and CEO, Andy Shaw, also wrote an open letter to the Governor that was published in the Chicago Sun Times -- reminding the Governor of his vow to keep Illinois “more transparent, accountable and accessible to the people”.

Proponents of HB 1716, including the state’s Attorney General Lisa Madigan, praise it for having a provision that lifts the pre-authorization requirement. At the moment, this requirement is needed for agencies to deny requests. But transparency supporters fear that the bill will greatly affect freelance journalists and watchdog groups by delaying their FOIA requests (especially if they are identified as “recurrent requestors”).

According to Maryam Judar of CAC, the Governor has until August 26th to either veto, amendatorily veto, or sign the bill. As we wait to hear the fate of Illinois’ FOIA, we continue to emphasize the importance of having an open and transparent state government. Our Open Letter call tool is available to help not only Illinoisans but all citizens to demand greater respect for transparency laws from their governors. By doing so, we become our own governors by arming ourselves with the power that knowledge provides -- just as Madison envisioned.

Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great work by covering local, state, and congressional political news. This week I have highlights from New Mexico, Georgia and Illinois.

New Mexico FBIHOP has been live blogging the New Mexican legislative session.  This year is a short 30 day session covering mostly budgetary issues.  Matt is doing a great job keeping on top of what is going on, along with the live streaming action on New Mexico Independent this legislative session will be well accounted for.  In the coming weeks we will be keeping track of the up and coming transparency initiatives in the state, so stay tuned.

Peach Pundit has a post about a former candidate for Governor's PAC, which hasn't filed a campaign report in a while, but had a great deal of money left over.   The blogger wondered if they had to continue to file if they had any left over funds. Apparently they do not have to disclosure left over funds and can do whatever they wants with it.

Illinois' The Quincy Pundit has a post about strange practices in the Quincy City Hall.  The City Attorney sent out a letter to people in the community, on official letterhead, basically asking them to not vote for a particular candidate for Mayor because that candidate would fire him.  Well, isn't that special.

I also wanted to point out this awesome article by MediaShift highlighting great work by 3 local bloggers from around the country.  I think this quote by blogger Chuck Welch sums up the local political bloggersphere perfectly.

"I think there are cases now where city council or city staff might be more cognizant that just because the newspaper reporter is not in the room it doesn't mean the community is not going to learn about whatever it is they are doing."

It is widely accepted that citizen journalists doesn't replace investigative journalists, however, that doesn't discount how important they are to keep track of local government.  With the recent court decision transparency is more important than ever we need people willing to dig through disclosure data and an active political blogosphere is where we look to find them.