I have highlights this week from Delaware, North Dakota, New York and Earmark Corner.

DelawarePolitics.net reports that the State Senate Minority Leader Charlie Copeland will support the FOIA request for Citizens for Clean Power for documents and expenditures from recent Energy Committee hearings about wind power. “I fully support and have led this General Assembly on the issue of transparency in government,” said Copeland. “I believe that if tax dollars are involved, people have a right to know how those dollars were spent. I fully support the release of these documents.” Excellent point Sen. Copeland, keep honoring those FOIA requests.

The Say Anything blog, in North Dakota, reports that a new database was created to show the budget and expenses for all the school systems in North Dakota.

In New York, Room Eight highlights an article in the NY Daily News that shows 40% of City Councilors have a conflict of interest with non profits that receive state money. This story comes at the tail of the controversy surrounding City Council Speaker Christine Quinn creation of fake non profits to funnel city money through. These stories make it obvious that non profits also need some transparency in regards to their relationship to elected officials.

Earmark Corner has highlights from Florida and South Carolina.

South Carolina Politics Today reports that the State House has just passed a bill that would require lawmakers to fill out a form when making budget requests so they can be identified with a potential earmark. This is a great transparency measure that will bring the earmark process out into the open.

The All Florida Blog lists some of the earmarks coming to the Tampa area from the state budget. It is important to see where earmarks are going and how much they are.

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This week I have highlights from Tennessee, South Carolina, Oregon, New Jersey, Minnesota, Delaware and Hawaii.

In Tennessee, Knox Views reports that the Knox County has put the campaign financial disclosure reports online for all candidates in Knox County races. The financial disclosure forms are pdfs of the actual paper reports and put on the election commissions’s Web site.

In South Carolina, SC6 has three very interesting posts investigating the campaign contributions given to Rep. Jim Clyburn. Part one looks into Rep. Clyburn’s campaign donors and where his contributions are coming from and how many of them are coming from constituents versus out of staters. Part two looks at companies that have never contributed to Rep. Clyburn in the past but suddenly started and then received a federal grant. The third part goes into the interesting donations coming from a New York City based corporate law firm that gives barely any money to federal level candidates outside New York but have given to Rep. Clyburn. These posts are interesting and are another reason, for why it’s important, to have campaign donations available on the Federal Election Commision’s Web site and OpenSecrets.org. Good job SC6.

In Oregon, Orygun has a great post that thoroughly explains the issues happening with the Oregon Revised Statutes that I highlighted earlier this week.

PolitickerNJ.com has a great March Madness esque competition to find the smartest New Jersey legislator. All you do is vote on which lawmaker you think is intellectually smarter. While I don’t know if someone can really measure someone else’s intelligence without knowing them, it is a fascinating way to see what constituents think about their lawmakers.

In Minnesota, Bluestem Prairie has a list of federal grants Rep. Tim Walz got (correction: I misunderstood Rep. Walz announced these grants did not get them) for area airports.

Two bloggers in Delaware want a state spending database and can’t seem to understand what could be causing state legislators to not mandate one. DelawarePolitics.net writes a post about a new law under consideration that would be put the spending for school systems online and also would introduce a state budget spending database. He even goes into details about what other states spent on a database and what it would cost Delaware since FedSpending.org became open source. Kilroy’s Delaware highlights TheNewsJournals state spending database and asks why Delaware can’t get this done.

In Hawaii, Poinography highlights a post at National Conference of State Legislator’s blog about how legislative voting systems don’t review voting by legislator. He then goes on to say Hawaii also doesn’t and you have to go through thousands of bill status pages to get the information. He might even take the initiative to “write a perl script able to automatically extract the data from those history pages… Which means that one of the (paid!) computer geeks at the Lege should be able to do the same.”

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This week I have highlights from South Dakota, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

South Dakota War College reported that the South Dakotans for Open and Clean Government ballot committee has gathered enough signatures to place the South Dakota Open and Clean Government Act on the November ballot. This legislation contains the following provisions:

Taxpayer funds could not be used to lobby or campaign for partisan political agendas, including increased taxes.

Legislators and their staff would be unable to use their legislative positions to secure a “golden-parachute”, state-contracted job.

The “pay to play” system — where state contracts are traded for campaign donations — would be outlawed.

A simple, searchable website with information on all state contracts over $500 (excluding employment contracts), would be launched so citizens can know how their money is being spent.

War College also highlights some of the features of Legistorm including a map of the travel that Sen. Johnson and his staff have taken.

South Dakota Watch has a great post about how much openness in government is too much and what should be considered bad transparency. This is in response to a article in the Argus Leader about the crimes that Sioux City Council candidates some of which are just traffic violations.

BillHobbs.com, in Tennessee, wrote a great post about his efforts to get the state of Tennessee to respect his Open Records request regarding a tape of construction being done at the governor’s mansion. Even though the tape is state property and should be available under open records laws, the governor’s office wouldn’t let Mr. Hobbs obtain a copy of the tape unless he pays $200 for a DVD.

In New York, Room Eight reports that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has formed fake organizations, that she can report to the council during budget enactment, that receive state money. Then for next year use the money given to the fake organizations to do political favors.

In Pennsylvania, Policy Blog, is responding to an interest discussion on whether the budget process is legitimate if legislators list programs to be funded and then let the governor decide which ones get the money.

In Delaware, Down with Absolutes goes through the process of winning a state contract.

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This week I have highlights from New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Maryland, Delaware, Hawaii, Alabama, and Iowa.

In New York, the Fighting 29^th, gives us an update on last week’s story about Rep. Kuhl’s trip to Brazil. The story produced by WHAM-13 notes that after the original story Rep. Kuhl’s office sent the news station a list of the expenses except for how much the air travel was. Apparently the government does not disclose how much military travel costs. After Rep. Kuhl’s office sent them an itinerary with flight hours they figured the airfare cost $28,000. I wonder why they wouldn’t disclose that?

Keystone Politics in Pennsylvania highlights the open records legislation that has been approved unanimously by the state house and is being sent to the governor to sign. This right to know law makes all government records public unless the document’s custodian can prove that they are classified.

Lowell at BadLand Blues highlights an interview with the governor about a bill regarding open government. The governor feels that open disclosure could violate privacy rights of citizens. The interview also gives the sponsor of the bill a chance to respond to the Governor’s accusations.

The Howard County Maryland Blog highlights the Maryland Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2008. This bill is being sponsored by Howard County delegates and will allow citizens to see how the state of Maryland spends tax money.

DelawarePolitics.net talks about the nepotism in Delaware. He would like to know how many family members of elected officials are being employeed by Delaware. Fair question maybe its time for people to investigate these links like we did in Congress is a family business.

ILind.net of Hawaii talks about his involvement the Sunshine Blogger Project. The goal of the project is to find out whether America’s governors archive the e-mail correspondences that go into and out of their offices. More importantly can they provide copies of those e-mails when members of the public request them. ILind request covered all governmental emails sent or received by the governor’s office during the four day period of February 1-4, 2008. Hopefully the bloggers participating in this project can get some positive disclosure.

In Alabama, Doc’s Political Parlor, talks about the new state senate bill that will ban PAC to PAC contributions. It does not, however, ban PACs from giving to political parties which could create a loophole. The loophole is being actively discussed and will be PACs contributing to parties, who will then, contribute to another PAC. Two steps forward one step back.

In Iowa Cyclone Conservatives points people to the Facebook and MySpace pages of Reps. Steve King and Tom Latham and Sen. Chuck Grassly. It’s great to see elected officials taking advantage of a new medium to connect with constituents.

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