PUBLIC INFORMATION -- "Most criticism of the Freedom of Information Act centers on agency
refusals to disclose requested records in a timely manner, notes federal secrecy-watcher Steven Aftergood. "But a
federal appeals court said this week that a Defense Department agency
was 'arbitrary and capricious' in its decision to release documents to a
Freedom of Information Act requester." The embarrassed parties: defense contractors Sikorsky Aircraft and Pratt & Whitney.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- "After a couple of weeks of negotiating with the city bureaucracy the
Berkeley Sunshine Ordinance has cleared all of the hurdles for
circulating an initiative," reports ordinance organizer Dean Metzger in the Berkeley Daily Planet. "Due to the lack of support from our city
elected officials and city staff, the committee felt that the only way
to get real sunshine (open government) in Berkeley was to circulate the
ordinance as an initiative and place the ordinance on the November 2010
ballot."
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- The Senate Rules Committee has approved a request by Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) to establish a Select Committee on California’s Public Records and Open Meeting Laws, of which Yee will chair.Select committees study complex issues rather than considering particular bills, but their work may lead to legislation.
FREE SPEECH -- The California Supreme Court today upheld a Los Angeles International
Airport ordinance barring Hare Krishnas from soliciting donations within
airport terminals, reports Will Buchanan for the Christian Science Monitor. They can speak about their beliefs inside, but not seek money.
PUBLIC INFORMATION -- Mike McKee, reporting in the San Francisco Recorder, notes that UCLA law professor Richard
Sander's long-proposed study of law school affirmative action policies'
effect, if any, on California State Bar examinations' pass rates met another obstacle recently. In a tentative opinion, San Francisco Superior
Court Judge Curtis Karnow concluded that the documents Sander seeks—historical data on past bar exams—don't fall within the
scope of documents traditionally subject to public disclosure.
FREE SPEECH -- Patterson City Attorney George Logan has filed a libel lawsuit against an anonymous group of
locals behind the Patterson IrriTator website, who refer to themselves
collectively and individually as Fred Ross, reports Kendall Wright in the Patterson Irrigator.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force will hold special meetings on Tuesdays, March 30 and April 6, to try to put into final form and language a series of amendments aimed at improving the Sunshine Ordinance. Both meetings will take place in City Hall Room 406, starting at 5 p.m. The latest version of the amendments is available on the Task Force's web site, http://sfgov.org/sunshine ; click on "Proposed Sunshine Ordinance Amendments March 2010" under "Announcements". Written comments may be sent c/o Task Force Clerk Chris Rustom -- by e-mail to sotf@sfgov.org or by postal mail to City Hall Room 244, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, San Francisco 94102.
PUBLIC FORUM LAW -- For his efforts to bring greater government transparency and protection for speech and press rights, Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) was honored with the Sunshine Award by the San Diego Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and, a few days earlier. by the San Francisco SPJ chapter with the James Madison Freedom of Information Award. A Madison Award also went to Californians Aware for its work as a nonprofit organization.
PUBLIC INFORMATION -- A bill by Assembly Member Mike Eng (D-El Monte) that would require all audits conducted by state agencies, as well as all state contracts valued at $5,000 or more, to be placed on a central website for review by the public, passed its first test today, gaining approval in the Assembly Committee on Businesses and Professions on a 7-2 vote.AB 1899 is co-sponsored by SEIU Local 1000 and Californians Aware.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- A Salinas Californian audit of public records compliance at local cities and Monterey County found uneven performance among the former and complete failure at the latter, report Leslie Griffy and Erandi Garcia.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- The City of Alameda's new Sunshine Issue Spotting Task Force will hold the first of several meetings tomorrow (March 24), tasked with reviewing, identifying, and prioritizing
key issues of
concern related to improving the public's access to City information.
OPEN MEETINGS -- An Orange County Superior court judge has concluded that the board of the Capistrano Unified School District violated the Brown Act in August 2008 in its concealment of a closed-door disciplinary action against its then-superintendent, the fifth time the board has been reprimanded for violating the open meeting law in the past three years, reports Scott Martindale in the Orange County Register.
WHISTLEBLOWERS -- Cross a government watchdog with a government whistleblower and what do you get? Crossman—Kimo Crossman, that is, a co-founder of San Francisco's Sunshine Posse and a man who doesn't like to see huge banks skate away from their tax obligations. Rebecca Bowe has the story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- FOIA (the federal Freedom of Information Act) will soon be 50 years old and while creating the then novel concept of a public right to know what lies in government files, and gradually becoming the verb journalists employ to mean asking to see what's there ("I'm planning to FOIA them for that"), its limitations have shown the need for a supplementary approach: getting the government to set up its files so they can be searched at will—on the Internet. The Sunlight Foundation has the legislation that would create POIA (the Public Online Information Act) and a good summary here.
FREE SPEECH -- The U.S. Supreme Court—against a strong dissent by Justice Samuel Alito—has let stand a decision upholding the right of high school officials to bar a student chamber music group from playing "Ave Maria" during their graduation ceremony, reports Mark Walsh in Education Week. Instead, the students reluctantly opted to perform the fourth movement of Gustav Holst’s “Second Suite in F for Military Band.”
PUBLIC INFORMATION -- "Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown has quietly granted
access to at least three people who requested to dig through more than
2,000 boxes of records documenting his two terms as governor, from 1975
to 1983," reports Chase Davis for California Watch. Brown's people say no one else has asked.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- A state lawmaker who in 2006 carried a bill sponsored by Californians Aware containing revolutionary changes to the open meetings and public records laws—only to see it vetoed after unanimous legislative approval—now says he will ask the current candidates for governor if they would sign such a measure were he to reintroduce it next year.
PUBLIC INFORMATION -- A federal appeals court has ordered the secretive Federal Reserve Board
to release records requested
by Bloomberg
News in 2008 under the Freedom of Information Act relating to the $2.14 trillion bank bailout, reports Barbara Hollingsworth for the Washington Examiner. Bloomberg
was seeking the names of firms that received TARP funds or assets that
were being used as collateral.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- Joe Nelson reports in the San Bernardino Sun that Supervisor Neil Derry today
released a draft of a proposed sunshine ordinance (text attached), designed
to work in tandem with a proposed ethics commission, to thwart improper practices in the county with the worst reputation in the state for corruption.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- A year ago Californians Aware observed Sunshine Week by noting adverse court rulings had just cost it the chance to defend open government and free speech rights, and had cost its president, Richard McKee, a stunning financial loss for putting his own resources on the line in that struggle. This Sunshine Week, which runs now through Saturday, sees CalAware—and McKee in particular—active in enforcing the transparency laws as never before.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- A Sunshine Week poll suggests that public cynicism that the federal government operates
in an atmosphere of secrecy is as strong as ever, despite President
Barack Obama's promises to make government information more easily
available to the public, reports Thomas Hargrove for Scripps Howard News Service.
OPEN MEETINGS -- Californians Aware co-founder Richard McKee—newly named the organization's Vice President/Open Government Compliance—has sued the
Tulare County Board of Supervisors to end its habit of lunching together without complying with the Brown Act when a voting majority is present and charging the meals on county credit cards, designating them as "work-related."
OPEN MEETINGS -- After a Brown Act lawsuit threat from Californians Aware, Tulare County Supervisors today agreed to put their practice of lunching together privately at the county’s expense before official meetings on hold while waiting for staff to draft
policy concerning supervisor meal and travel expense reimbursement, reports Jenna Chandler in the Porterville Recorder.
PUBLIC INFORMATION -- "Three years of field notes from parole agents supervising John
Albert Gardner III after his release from prison on a 2000 molestation
conviction were destroyed under a state policy that is being reviewed
as he faces charges of raping and murdering Chelsea King," report Michael Gardner and Jeff McDonald for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
OPEN MEETINGS -- Members of the Los Angeles City Council are marked present and voting on open meeting agenda items—and voting Aye to boot—even if they're outside the council chamber and down the hall at the time, huddled in private meetings with one another, staff, lobbyists or developers, reportDavid Zahniser and Maeve Reston in the Los Angeles Times.
OPEN GOVERNMENT -- While for now the wraps are being kept around details of a novel piece of transparency legislation to be introduced in Congress next week, supporters are already gathering signatures for a letter urging hearings for the Public Online Information Act—POIA.
WHISTLEBLOWERS -- "In a bid to
secure a much-needed bipartisan victory, the Obama administration is
trying to secure passage of protections for government whistleblowers.
But some advocacy groups are complaining that the legislation does not
go far enough to protect government employees in the national security
field and, in fact, would roll back protections that FBI whistleblowers
now have," reportsKasie Hunt for Politico.com.
PUBLIC INFORMATION -- Thomas Peele, award-winning investigative journalist for the Contra Costa Times and the Bay Area News Group, reports that a recent trial court decision in Sacramento not only shines light on the parole supervision of a suspected sex slave kidnapper but for the first time recognizes the force of Proposition 59, the open government constitutional amendment.
FREE SPEECH -- "Few recent confrontations have stirred as much emotion and debate as
the spate of protests conducted at funerals for U.S. soldiers
killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the Supreme Court
agreed to take up one of the cases stemming from those protests, a
hot-button First Amendment dispute that will be argued in the fall," reports Tony Mauro in the Blog of LegalTimes.
