Transparency in government
This year is the 40th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, signed into law in 1966 by President Johnson with the lofty goal of permitting public access to government records. After all, the government is working for the public, right?
Last year, the Sunshine Week campaign was launched for the first time in response to the growing number of documents "redacted" by the federal government. The Bush administration has classified more documents than any in our history, a trend that worried newspaper editors (among others) and prompted them to call for more transparency in government.
Sunshine Week was actually held back in March, and the Corvallis Gazette-Times was one of several newspapers nationwide that submitted requests to local government agencies asking for various documents to be released. Most complied locally, the only exception being the Benton County District Attorney, who declined to disclose DUI cases that had not yet been heard. Guess he feels he is above the law, because who the heck is going to go after the DA, anyway?
So, why am I writing about this more than a month after the fact? First of all, I fully intended to do so at the time, but it slipped my mind. But what reminded me about Sunshine Week was a section of the City of Corvallis website that I stumbled upon while trying to figure out which city council ward I live in. The city of Corvallis is so dedicated to transparency that you can actually see every email sent to either the mayor or city council members.
After a good 20 minutes of voyeuristically rifling through the mayor's email, I have found this very enlightening. It's a good way to gauge public opinion on various issues. For example, letters against the Earth Charter outweighed letters for, some calling upon the mayor to reverse the town's further decline. Hee hee! There were also letters addressed to Ms. Berg with "Dear Sir," showing that some people can't be bothered with simply looking up the name of the person to whom they are writing. And there were a slew of letters offering to enlarge certain portions of Ms. Berg's anatomy that I am fairly confident do not exist.
Last year, the Sunshine Week campaign was launched for the first time in response to the growing number of documents "redacted" by the federal government. The Bush administration has classified more documents than any in our history, a trend that worried newspaper editors (among others) and prompted them to call for more transparency in government.
Sunshine Week was actually held back in March, and the Corvallis Gazette-Times was one of several newspapers nationwide that submitted requests to local government agencies asking for various documents to be released. Most complied locally, the only exception being the Benton County District Attorney, who declined to disclose DUI cases that had not yet been heard. Guess he feels he is above the law, because who the heck is going to go after the DA, anyway?
So, why am I writing about this more than a month after the fact? First of all, I fully intended to do so at the time, but it slipped my mind. But what reminded me about Sunshine Week was a section of the City of Corvallis website that I stumbled upon while trying to figure out which city council ward I live in. The city of Corvallis is so dedicated to transparency that you can actually see every email sent to either the mayor or city council members.
After a good 20 minutes of voyeuristically rifling through the mayor's email, I have found this very enlightening. It's a good way to gauge public opinion on various issues. For example, letters against the Earth Charter outweighed letters for, some calling upon the mayor to reverse the town's further decline. Hee hee! There were also letters addressed to Ms. Berg with "Dear Sir," showing that some people can't be bothered with simply looking up the name of the person to whom they are writing. And there were a slew of letters offering to enlarge certain portions of Ms. Berg's anatomy that I am fairly confident do not exist.
posted by Corvallist at
7:59 AM
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