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Current Headlines
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Potomac News: Equal exposure |
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Equal exposure
http://www.insidenova.com/isn/news/opinion/article/equal_exposure/5475/
Published: March 18, 2008
Taxpayer-funded salaries are public information and the people have the right to see what anybody who works for the government makes.
Some readers have criticized this newspaper for its inclusion of an online database of Prince William County teacher salaries on our Web site. Some of the criticisms have focused on the fact that any teacher’s name and salary can be found.
Why not just publish the names and salaries of administrators? Why expose the salaries of teachers, who want to do nothing more than educate our children?
Our role, as a newspaper, is to provide the public with the information they are entitled to see. In doing this, we have to be fair and to shine our spotlight on all public employees equally.
It would not make sense for us to publish the names and salaries of those high up in the administration without also publishing the names and salaries of teachers. Just because teachers make less does not mean their information is any more private than the superintendent, deputy superintendent or central office staffers. And where would we draw the line? Certainly not by job or by salary level; some teachers earn more than administrative employees.
Some callers and writers have suggested that we could have just published people’s titles, rather than their names, and accomplished the same goal. But the top earners like the superintendent, deputy superintendent, principals and others could have still been identified. Publishing titles would give the illusion of protecting privacy without actually doing so.
In the end, we decided we would provide our readers with all the information we could.
If taxpayers fund a position, they have the right to know how much they are paying so they can determine whether the employee is worth that salary. That’s what the law says and we agree.
We did not censor. We did not obfuscate. We did not sugarcoat. We just gave you easy access to your information.
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Roanoke Times: Local officials prefer clouds to sunshine |
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Local officials prefer clouds to sunshine
By Christian Trejbal
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/trejbal/wb/154807
Sunshine Week, the special time of year when we reflect on the importance of open government for a free society, begins today.
During the last 12 months, lawmakers great and small sought new ways to prevent Americans from knowing what government does in their name. Sure, there were some victories for the public, but secrecy remained distressingly popular.
At least here in the New River Valley, there wasn't much backsliding from openness. While the likes of Christiansburg's Del. Dave Nutter were busy in Richmond fighting against accountability, our local leaders held the line.
It wasn't hard, seeing as the line they held is so far into the shadows to begin with.
Local governments don't break Virginia's open meetings laws and Freedom of Information Act. They post proper notices for public meetings and respond to records requests. They just don't go out of their way to make government transparent.
Consider something as simple as a town or county Web site. Citizens might expect to find some simple things. Detailed agendas for town council and board of supervisors meetings would be handy. Afterward, it would be nice to see minutes.
Good luck finding such information, at least in any useful form.
Giles County, for example, hides its agenda, if it posts one at all.
So does Pulaski County, but at least they post minutes so citizens can find out what happened after the fact -- many months after the fact. The most recent ones are for meetings that took place last summer.
Governments that do post their meeting agendas seem to go out of their way to make them mostly useless. They fill them with cryptic municipal language and withhold supporting documents that would help residents understand what's going on.
Radford City Council's March 10 meeting included a "resolution in support of a grant application through Virginia Recreational Trail Program in the amount of $50,000 for Wildwood Park improvements."
Who is applying for the grant? What improvements do they want to make? The documents that council received prior to the meeting no doubt contained the answers to such questions, but the public didn't get to see them without jumping through hoops.
Local governments don't release their agendas in a timely manner, either. Governments that meet on Tuesday, for example, typically distribute an agenda late on Friday. The public has no real chance to seek an explanation before it is time to gather at town hall.
Even if they could get them out early on Friday, it could make a difference.
This sort of stuff isn't difficult. If elected officials and government employees cared about keeping the public in the loop, they could easily post comprehensive agendas well in advance and minutes afterward.
They could make government transparent.
Yet around here, even the most fundamental documents are sometimes tough to find.
The old saying that ignorance of the law is no excuse is dangerous in Christiansburg. The town, like many others, doesn't put its code online, fostering legal ignorance.
There might be hope. The town plans to overhaul its Web site in the coming months. Maybe amidst the beautification, designers will find space for helpful content.
The most open government in the NRV is Blacksburg. There, they've implemented some exciting things in recent years, not least live, streaming video of council meetings over the Internet. Afterward, the video is archived on the town Web site for anyone to watch.
Other local governments haven't even figured out how to use a tape recorder, so hoping they will follow Blacksburg's lead might be too optimistic.
Not that Blacksburg is perfect. The town council has a habit of conducting its most interesting discussions after most people have gone home. Council members sit quietly at the dais, but get them into the after-meeting work session, and they hold serious conversations about how to run the town.
Yet few citizens hear these talks. The council turns off the cameras for those meetings. Indeed, they retreat to a cramped, windowless room in the basement. The sessions are open to the public, even if they're not conducive to the public.
Elected officials almost invariably slide toward secrecy. They somehow convince themselves that the public doesn't want or need to know some things.
And maybe a lot of people don't care about the daily and weekly doings of government. But some people do, and those watchdogs deserve better access in the NRV.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
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Washington Examiner: Why wait to let the sun shine, Hillary? |
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http://www.examiner.com/printa-1285117~Why_wait_to_let_the_sun_shine,_Hillary?.html
Editorial
Why wait to let the sun shine, Hillary?
The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper
2008-03-18 08:00:00.0
Current rank: # 2,513 of 9,532
WASHINGTON -
Sunshine Week — sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation — started Monday and continues through the weekend with events celebrating the public’s right to know and the importance of freedom of information in government. A main feature of Sunshine Week 2008 is a survey of presidential candidates on their attitudes toward open government issues.
Coincidentally, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s responses were featured Monday on the Sunshine Week Web site. Clinton told the Sunshine Week survey that she believes “in an open, transparent government that is accountable to the people. Excessive government secrecy harms democratic governance and can weaken our system of checks and balances by shielding officials from oversight and inviting misconduct or error.”
She promised to “make it clear to everyone in the Executive Branch that I expect my administration to be open and responsive to the public.” She further promised to appoint an attorney general of similar mind, to roll back President Bush’s executive order making release of presidential documents dependent upon the whims of former chief executives, and to put federal contracts and budgets online. Finally, according to Sunshine Week, she promised that if elected she would “prospectively” release names of donors to the Clinton presidential library and the Clinton foundation.
Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain has responded to the Sunshine Week survey, but Clinton is uniquely positioned to demonstrate good faith by delivering on her promised openness now, instead of after the election. Her first step should be clearing the path for journalists, academics and other researchers seeking access to the millions of key Clinton administration documents hidden in the Clinton presidential library.
The documents can shed needed light on her role during her husband’s administration in such controversies as the White House travel office firings, her health care task force’s flouting of federal public meetings laws, and her directives in the aftermath of Vince Foster’s death.
Also, she should let the sun shine now on documents concerning her weekly meetings with officials from the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department to vet judicial nominees. And she should open access to all documents on her role in foreign policy decisions concerning Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland and Rwanda.
Step two is to release all of her tax returns, as is customary for serious presidential candidates. Step three is to make public all donor names to the Clinton library and foundation. Anything less than these three immediate steps, and Clinton’s open government promises won’t mean a thing to anybody except gullible journalists who accept them at face value.
Examiner
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USA Today: Open-government promises too often fade into secrecy |
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Open-government promises too often fade into secrecy
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/03/open-government.html#more
When candidates are seeking your vote, they can be counted on to mouth civics-book pieties about the public's right to know what's going on in government. They promise to hold meetings in the open, make government records readily available and generally end excessive secrecy.
The three leading contenders for the presidency are no exception:
* Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a statement released Sunday she is "committed to restoring open government," both by mandating more open meetings and release of public documents and by nominating "an attorney general who has a proven commitment to open government."
* Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., pledges to "turn the page on a growing empire of classified information" and "help connect government to its citizens and engage citizens in a democracy."
* Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says that "a democratic government operates best in the disinfecting light of the public eye," and that "ethics and transparency are not election-year buzz words; they are the obligations of democracy and the duties of honorable public service."
These are comforting words. But all too often there is a huge gap — both in Washington and in the states — between the promises of open government and the reality. Once elected, political leaders find it all too easy to justify a retreat to closed-door meetings and classified documents.
Clinton, for example, earned a reputation for secrecy during her husband's presidency by keeping the public in the dark as she hatchedher ill-fated health care reform proposals. As USA TODAY reported last week, records from the Clinton years are only very slowly being pried out of the archives, and then with major areas still blacked out.
As for Obama, Chicago news media have pointed out several instances in which he has been unable to produce records from his term as an Illinois state senator, his only experience in public office before 2005.
And, according to watchdog groups monitoring the subject, McCain has at times supported the continued classification of certain records from the Vietnam War, which ended more than 30 years ago.
Polls suggest the public is concerned. In a new nationwide survey released Sunday by the organizers of Sunshine Week, an open-government advocacy coalition, 74% of adults said they view the federal government as secretive, up from 62% just two years ago. Nearly 90% said they consider it important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government before they vote.
The earnest platitudes of the current campaign are little different from those of eight years ago, when Republicans seeking to win back the White House sought to capitalize on public weariness with the dissembling and stonewalling of the Clinton era.
What followed, however, was a Bush administration that could well be the most secrecy-obsessed in U.S. history, one that undercut severely the public's right to know, embodied in the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act.
Backlogs of unanswered requests for information — some of them lying around for more than a decade — reached record levels. Staffing and budgets for responding to public inquires were allowed to wither, and the rules for enforcing public access to records were turned on their head.
In reaction, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined last December to pass overwhelmingly a landmark package of major reforms. These include new monetary penalties on agencies that don't respond to freedom of information requests within 20 days; a publicly accessible tracking system for individual requests; and ways of making it easier to recover attorney's fees when citizens are forced to file suit to get records to which they are entitled.
But just weeks after he quietly signed the new law, President Bush tucked into his budget for next year an attempt to undercut one of its most important provisions. Bush's plan would wipe out the new position of a freedom-of-information ombudsman in the National Archives and move the function to the Justice Department.
This would put what is supposed to be an independent office, charged with assisting the public and mediating disputes over access to records, under the umbrella of the same department responsible for representing government officials trying to invent excuses to withhold records. These officials opposed passage of the new reform law and were the leaders in throwing up legal roadblocks to open government over the past seven years.
The move, now the subject of yet another confrontation between the administration and leading members of both parties in Congress, is just the latest example of the longstanding fight for public access to information about what government is doing.
James Madison, born 257 years ago Sunday, said self-governing people "must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." Voters should insist that the next president give them that power, not just high-minded campaign promises that don't last past Election Day.
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Roanoke Times editorial: The Adventures of [REDACTED] |
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Editorial: The Adventures of [REDACTED]
Government censors take on a classic.
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/wb/xp-154789
The Freedom of Information Act empowers citizens to demand government documents. Curious people have found terrible government abuses and wonderful government successes.
Yet too many elected officials prefer secrecy. They whittle away at the public's right to know, exempting certain types of information for FOIA.
They try to have it both ways. Voters like openness, so politicians keep the documents public. They just render them useless with a black pen.
When an agency releases a document, it can redact it. That's the practice of blacking out portions, and it's something government officials abuse to great effect.
Rather than demonstrate the power of redaction with a boring government document, we pulled an American classic from the shelf, one that most people read in school and are familiar with.
Below is the second paragraph of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." If the government had its way, the text wouldn't make much sense.
Visit blogs.roanoke.com/roundable to read the original passage and see what you're missing.
Then think about thwat else you're missing. What embarassing facts and criminal acts do elected officials hide with a black pen?
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