Citizens work wonders with information on their side… when they aren’t being kicked out of public meetings

What can citizens do once they have government information?

In Bell, California, three senior city officials were making lavish salaries. The Chief Administrative Officer, Robert Rizzo, was making $787,637 for running the city of less than 40,000. When citizens found out, they were rightfully outraged and their anger translated into the resignation of those three officials. Now activist groups are calling for the resignation of 4 out of the 5 city council members. These positions are part time, but the council members are making more close to $100,000.

“It’s showing that the residents are ready and willing to fix this problem and they’re going to move forward until they get justice and get a government that works for them,” said Christina Garcia, the head of one of the activist groups involved in organizing upset citiznes. The group is calling for open records and an exhaustive audit of the city’s finances. Coincidentally, the city gets an “F” on transparency using our 10 point transparency checklist.

Citizens armed with information are fully-vested with the power they need in order to keep their government accountable. But what about those instances where information is kept from citizens?

Mike Gatto, California State Assemblyman, avoids cameras and answering question. But that’s putting it lightly. One man representing the assemblyman who can only kindly be described as “overly aggressive” in his tactics kicked a journalist out from a public meeting in a public library. Less than 30 people attended the meeting. And that’s how many would find out what really happened in that meeting,

Police at the scene threatened to arrest the journalist if he didn’t leave. Of course, the journalist was the last person that needed to be threatened by police. Perhaps the police should have threatened the assemblyman and compelled him to acknowledge California’s open meetings law.

Several things I’ve learned through #FOIAchat, our weekly Twitter conference on Freedom of Information issues, come to mind. First, video cameras will bring out the worst in public officials and their staff as far as secrecy goes. But few will object to, or notice, a voice recorder. For many reasons, video is far superior to just voice recording, but it is better than nothing. Second, the fact that Mike Gatto is acting like a diva is a story in itself. If this were a special on VH1, it would be understandable why he wouldn’t want unexpected cameras. But as an elected official, paid by taxpayer money, he has no right to exclude journalists (and thereby exclude his constituents) from public meetings. This is a story on it’s own right, and had he let the journalist in the meeting, the journalist probably wouldn’t have found anything as worthy of reporting as Gatto’s power trip.

Lastly, people are becoming a part of government accountability, and officials should embrace this and learn to work with citizens instead of trying to push us out. We’ve talked about the benefits to governments and citizens alike to letting cameras into open meetings. Officials can benefit by having justifications for their decisions available and they can also see a decrease in Freedom of Information Act requests. The benefits to citizens are obvious.

It won’t work to keep us out, we’re already in. Officials need to get with the times and include us in the conversation, or suffer the wrath of informed citizens.