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 job of covering local, state, and congressional political news.  This week I have highlights from New York, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Rochester Turning in New York, has a post about former Congressman Tom Reynolds getting hired at a law firm.  Even though Reynolds isn’t a lawyer he was hired for the firms “Government Relations and Public Policy practice.”  Interestingly that sounds like lobbyist.   Good to see the revolving door in full swing.

In Ohio, Thurber’s Thoughts has a post  about the mayor of Toledo, Carty Finkbeiner, not respecting open records laws. The post is about how several people have attempted to get information about various issues and their requests not being met.  The author is more outraged at the local paper for not catching on to the lack of openness until they wanted something.

Pennsyvania’s Policy Blog talks about the cost of spending databases. The price for an online spending database is apparently not as high a barrier as some public officials thought.

In Illinois, Disarranging Mine about dealing locally with the lobbyists restrictions in the recovery bill. The story of how the lobbyist restrictions are being played out at the local level is pretty interesting.  I think the question is, if there is government money to be spent and there is no lobbyist there to hear about it does it get spent?

Advance Indiana about the new laws of lobbying disclosure just passed by the Indianapolis city council.  Apparently the definition of lobbying does not include entities looking for government contracts or grants.  Interesting.