Tennessee website earns Government-to-Citizen Achievement Award

The Center for Digital Government has given the Tennessee General Assembly website the Government-to-Citizen Award. This is the second year that the site has earned the award.

According to the Center for Digital Government, the site has been noted for it’s amount of educational material, being well organized, nice design, and streaming video clips with agendas and bill information.

Sunshine Review is also impressed with Tennessee’s efforts. The state website earned an “A” transparency grade for proactively disclosing information online. We particularly liked to see the state posting its contract and salary data online, and hope that more states will follow Tennessee’s lead.

Transparency news from around the nation

Here are a few transparency updates from around the nation.

* ILLINOIS: The Chicago Tribune started an Open Records help desk to display “Strategy, help and stories about getting public information in Illinois”. Good move from the Trib, since Chicago’s Mayor Daley routinely denies FOIA requests.

Another IL piece worth reading is the Mill Creek Times’ analysis of its local government website. It mentions that Mill Creek Special Service Area is “absolutely deficient” when graded on the standards set forth in the Sunshine Review checklist.

* MICHIGAN: The Clare Sentinel published an excellent letter to the editor titled, “Grandmother spearheads transparency effort to put school district check registers online.” The letter demonstrates that school transparency is much easier than most people think. It takes just minutes per day!

* OKLAHOMA: Oklahomans for Responsible Government, a fiscal watchdog group, lamented the lack of county transparency in the Sooner State, and revealed their new transparency initiative regarding school districts.

* TENNESSEE: Governor Phil Bredesen announced a new website, TN.gov, that increases transparency by listing vendor payments and employee travel reimbursements and salaries.

* FEDERAL: President Obama is working to roll back union transparency laws. According to the Heritage Foundation, these regulations make union officials more accountable to union members and deter fraud and embezzlement.

TN Leg: Transparency is great… for someone else

Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, describes new “improvements” to the state’s Open Records Act in today’s Tennessean. Although the law demands citizen access to all state, county, and municipal records during all business hours, Johnson describes the reality of trying to view information.

[W]hen Tennesseans request such information, they receive responses including: “I am a little stressed right now, so I appreciate it if you don’t add to that”; “Please explain to me why you need bills on any credit or debit cards used by the city”; and “You will need to send a formal letter with references that we can verify.”
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Recently, TCPR took the state Department of Finance and Administration to court to force the department to hand over documents that, despite being requested nine months earlier, had still not been made available. The state Department of Economic and Community Development took five months to reply to a TCPR open-records request … just to let us know they were denying it.

In the Tennessee legislature’s haphazard attempt to update the Open Records law, they specified a 7-day window for government to address information requests. However, they also piled on exemptions to the law, including exemptions for the legislature.

The question remains: What do TN legislators have to hide from their constituents?