{"id":1175,"date":"2012-01-13T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-13T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/public-hearing-doesnt-mean-the-public-gets-to-know-anything.html"},"modified":"2012-01-13T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-13T16:00:00","slug":"public-hearing-doesnt-mean-the-public-gets-to-know-anything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/public-hearing-doesnt-mean-the-public-gets-to-know-anything.html","title":{"rendered":"Public hearing doesn’t mean the public gets to know anything"},"content":{"rendered":"\nJane Osborn wrote:<\/a>\n
\nRequesting such a hearing before January 24 would give the opportunity\nto have all this information presented and for questions to be asked\nand answered.\n<\/blockquote>\nExcept that’s not the way it works around here.\nPublic hearing locally means the chairman or mayor or whoever says\n“Who wants to speak for?”\nand maybe somebody speaks.\nAnd then “Who wants to speak against?”\nand maybe somebody speaks.\nIt doesn’t mean that the Commission or the Council or the Authority\npresents anything for the public to consider.\n

\nWitness the\n\n<\/a>\n\nhearing the Lowndes County Commission\nheld in December on the documents related to the Comprehensive Plan.<\/a>\nThe only reason the public knew anything about what was in those documents\nwas that Gretchen got them from somewhere else after the Commission\nrefused to supply them in response to an open records request.\nThe Commission never distributed any of the relevant documents\nto the public.\nOnly one citizen spoke, perhaps because nobody else knew what\nto speak about.\n

\nAlmost none of the local municipalities or boards or authorities\nroutinely present to the public the information that is in the\npackets they see before the discuss or vote.\nThere are rare exceptions, such as the VLMPO<\/a>\nand other organizations or projects administered by the\n\nSouthern Georgia Regional Commission (SGRC)<\/a>.\nSGRC is a state agency, not a local agency.\nWhy does Lowndes County and all its municipalities and boards\navoid transparency?\n

\nWhy can’t you, the public, see what’s in a rezoning request before\n\n\nan appointed body makes a recommendation on it or an elected body votes on it?\nWhat can’t you see a contract before a vote?\nOr even after, for that matter?\n

\nIs it simply that local government bodies are used to dealing with\nsuch things on paper, and paper costs a lot to distribute to the public?\nIf so, that’s a lingering legacy we could do without, especially considering\nthat contracts all start in electronic form nowadays, and even hand-written\nrezoning applications take only a few minutes to scan and turn into a PDF.\nThen it’s only another minute to slap them up on the web.\n

\nHere’s how it’s done in\n\nTravis County, Texas.<\/a>\nHere’s how it’s done not quite as well in\n\nChatham County, Georgia.<\/a>\n

\nThere’s no reason the local elected and appointed bodies here couldn’t do the same.\nNo, I don’t believe it would cost more.\nAll the elected bodies and many of the appointed ones are already\nrunning websites.\nSticking board packets on the web routinely would save a lot of\nopen records requests.\nIt would even lead to information from the public that would help\nlocal governments do their job.\n

\nThat Internet thing: it might be here to stay.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jane Osborn wrote: Requesting such a hearing before January 24 would give the opportunity to have all this information presented and for questions to be asked and answered. Except that’s not the way it works around here. Public hearing locally means the chairman or mayor or whoever says “Who wants to speak for?” and maybe […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,40,2,88,3],"tags":[3213,1255,8701,7,8734,1280,722,8778,237,8700,238,6,8852],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-government","category-lowndes-county-commission","category-transparency","tag-board-packet","tag-chatham-county","tag-georgia","tag-lowndes-county","tag-lowndes-county-commission","tag-public","tag-public-hearing","tag-sgrc","tag-texas","tag-transparency","tag-travis-county","tag-valdosta","tag-vlmpo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-iX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}