Thou Shall Discuss Numbers in Public

The LA Times is serious about open government. They have a decent hub for public documents here.

From the LA Times:

Since the pub­lic cor­rup­tion scan­dal broke last sum­mer in the city of Bell, hun­dreds of read­ers have voiced con­cerns to The Times about po­ten­tial prob­lems at the gov­ern­ment agen­cies in their com­munit­ies. The Times en­cour­ages read­ers to share gov­ern­ment re­cords you con­sider news­worthy or in­ter­est­ing. Send us doc­u­ments and a Times staffer will re­view them and post them to this site, which also in­cludes files ob­tained by our re­port­ers.

Notice how the times says, SINCE the story broke in the city of Bell concerns have poured in. The same thing happened at the Attorney General's Office. According to public affairs officer the AG was sent over 1000 complaints. Apparently, the public did not believe the AG (or the LA Times) were that interested or motivated to investigate possible problems. Investigations take much more effort than printing press releases of celebrities and politicians.

The elected officials and, increasingly, the public servant corps are happiest when the public is absolutely ignorant of what is happening in government.

What the LA Times is doing is great, but you can't share public records if the city keeps the records a secret (ex roads report,  applications, disciplinary reports).

The times does remind us about:

Cit­izens keep an eye out for per­son­nel eval­u­ations con­duc­ted in closed ses­sions. Jen­kins said fre­quent or on­go­ing eval­u­ation of a top staff mem­ber, such as a city man­ager, would be un­usu­al. New­ton said that any time a body moves to make an ap­point­ment or to hire a new em­ploy­ee, there must be a pub­lic dis­cus­sion of that per­son’s com­pens­a­tion. “There has to be an open and pub­lic dis­cus­sion about com­pens­a­tion,” he said.

Leucadia to Council: We expect to hear a healthy dialogue on staff compensation in the coming months, otherwise we are going to wonder if the real deal had been worked out at some backyard BBQ. That would be against the law.