This week I have highlights from Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Hawaii and Louisiana.

In Pennsylvania, Above Average Jane has a great post summarizing what bills passed State Legislature during the week.

In Mississippi, Y’all Politics posts about ethics reform legislation that passed the state legislature and is on its way to be signed by the governor. This bill would increase the number of persons who must file economic interest disclosure forms, would create more enforcement of open-meeting laws and would make public-record law improvements.

In Hawaii, Poinography has a follow-up to a previous post about how citizens cannot find voting information sorted by legislator. In response, he wrote a "script to download all of the bill status pages and to pull out the voting information for each legislator." Inquirers can find a link in the fifth paragraph of the above post to download the data. This is great work. Thanks Poinography!

In Louisiana, The Daily Kingfish has a great post highlighting the useful features of GovTrack and how it allows citizens keep track of their Congressional delegations.

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Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and Congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Florida.

In Hawaii, iLind.net goes through the state ethics commission’s failure to act when the Hawaii Superferry, Inc didn’t fully disclose their lobbying efforts. iLind.net makes a good case for why the ethics commission should be more forceful when these types of violations occur.

In New York, Politics on the Hudson has created a database that shows what earmarks Albany legislators brought to their districts.

TerryFrank.net in Tennessee highlights, an editorial in Tennessean, on the status of an open records bill in the state legislature. The bill has been passed out of committee but with amendments to make it more difficult to gain access to public records.  A provision would lenghthen the time requests can be complied with and would give different access to documents for in state and out of state citizens. 

GraniteGrok of New Hampshire has a great post about the movement to put more local government information online by the citizens of Gilford, New Hampshire. There has been a move to look at what improvements could be made to the local government’s Web site. It also highlights the work of SunshineReview.org, who have a very handy ten point government website transparency checklist.

I have been meaning to highlight Florida Politics for their weekly roundup on the bills that having been going through the Florida state legislature.

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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 Virginia, New Jersey, Alabama, Hawaii, and Maryland.

In Virginia, Vivian J. Page, highlights the city of Norfolk, VA’s new YouTube channel. The channel has videos about what is going on in the community. This is a great use of available technology to get messages out to the community.

In New Jersey, Blog the Fifth, discusses Rep. Scott Garrett’s new chief of staff, Amy D. Smith. Smith is a Capitol Hill veteran and also a former lobbyist. She lobbied for the firm Bartlett, Bendall, & Kadesh LLC. Makes you wonder about the revolving door and the perception of conflict of interest.

Mooncat at Left in Alabama highlights Follow the Money’s new Legislative Committee Analysis tool. This new tool shows you the top contributors to committee members and who has contributed to the committee as a whole and what industries are giving money.

In Hawaii, Poinography, talks about providing bloggers with legal protection if they grant a source anonymity. Hawaii state house is considering a bill that includes bloggers under shield protections.  However, this bill is not scheduled for a hearing.

Also in Hawaii, iLind.net, got a response from his Sunshine Blogger Request request to Gov. Linda Lingle’s office for emails. Half of the emails requested were provided the other half were withheld under executive privilege. This is a pretty interesting read to see what was learned from this FOI request and to see what the governor considers executive privilege.

Maryland Politics blog has a great post on what Montgomery County’s senators are working on by providing a list of sponsored bills for each state senator. This is a great reminder that people should be checking out their state government sites, as well as, OpenCongress.org to see if the bills their elected officials are championing are being passed and if you agree with them or not.

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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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This week I have highlights from Iowa, Michigan, Hawaii, South Dakota, and Texas.

Blog for Iowa, reports that the Iowan House of Representatives has a WordPress Blog! You can use it to get updates on what is going on in the Iowan house. The blog features audio from the House Chamber, calendar of events, and will also use content from YouTube and Facebook.

In Michigan, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood has a great post investigating a few earmarks. The post talks about why a particular earmark is necessary and whether Rep. Rogers is playing both sides of the fence by being against certain earmarks but asking for some as well.

Hawaii Blog reports that the Hawaii State Legislature is looking for a full time year round blogger. The position comes with full benefits! Today’s your last day to apply!

In South Dakota, S.D. Watch reports a little transparency reversal. Apparently the State of South Dakota is suing a judge because he will not disclose information about a meeting with defense attorneys.

In Texas, Big Houston talks about how the city of Houston is posting health inspection information online but isn’t posting all of them until some public pressure made them change their minds. So everyone visit Houston and avoid places that have health violations. I wonder if other cities do this.

Shine on Sunlighters Shine on!

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This week I have highlights from Kentucky, Tennessee, Wyoming and Hawaii.

In Kentucky, KYKrumudgeon spent some time addressing an opinion made recently from the state’s Legislative Ethics Commission. The opinion reversed a judgment made in 1995 regarding Kentucky campaign contribution laws established in 1993. The ethics law, prohibited lawmakers from asking lobbyists to contribute to their campaigns, however, in 1995 the commission said that lawmakers could ask lobbyists to contribute to political parties.

In Tennessee, BillHobbs and Tennessee Politics blog talk about how a legislative study committee decided to roll back some of the state’s sunshine laws. If the committee’s roll back is allowed then state and local boards will be allowed to hold more discussions that affect the public in private. Also Smart City Memphis points to Knox County Chancellor Daryl Fansler’s ruling on the sunshine law. The opinion is in regards to the Open Meeting Act and is an interesting explanation of why these laws are important.

In Wyoming, NewWest talks about Rep. Cubin’s poor voting record. She is at a 46% voting rate which is one of the poorest in the House. The article, the post refers to, goes into some depth over the nature of her missing votes pointing out that her husband has been very ill and has been in the hospital for almost the entire year. Rep. Cubin’s attendence brings up an important question. It is well known that members of Congress have very busy work schedules that involve a lot of travel, especially for the members from western states. How should a Congressperson balance the challenges of governance with the needs of a loved one?

Hawaii Blog discusses Rep. Jon Riki Karamatsu’s DUI arrest. What is interesting about this is Rep. Karamatsu has a blog and actually blogged about the incident. He then proceeded to acknowledge his mistake and start a discussion on how the media would have treated this incident if he wasn’t open about it. This would have been a revolutionary way for an elected official to communicate with his constituents regarding a controversy if he had let the post stay up for more than two hours. *sigh*

That’s all I got this week. Keep letting in the Sunlight!

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I have been keeping track of local blogs that do a great job of informing people about what is happening in Congress, state level, and local level politics. These blogs provide valuable information and I am taking the time each week to point out some highlights from around the country. As promised, here is this week’s update on Sunlight in the states.

In Alabama, Left in Alabama talks about how Gov. Riley is going to support Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham’s proposal to post, immediately, on the state’s Web site all flights using state planes, including information regarding passengers, destinations, and the purpose of the trip. The measure even goes as far as to penalize lawmakers if they do not reimburse the state for private trips. I’m sensing a recurring theme, considering the New York ethics commission also recently commented on the use of state planes for political purposes.

In Hawaii, there have been some discussions regarding the definition of journalism because of a proposed shield law, which would legally safeguard journalists from disclosing the sources of both published and unpublished information in state courts, but would not offer the same protection for bloggers. The official Hawaiian House blog recently defined Hawaii’s reasons for this decision, which blogger Poinography disputed in a very good point-by-point rebuttal.

In Illinois, Woodfordtaxfacts.org has been keeping tabs on the progress of Woodford County’s official Web site, which, deserves kudos for providing RSS feeds and a eLibrary with minutes from County committees and the County Board. Woodfortaxfacts.org also deserves a tip of the hat for emphasizing that transparency and access are important so people can take ownership of their government.

Thanks to Tom Cusack for alerting me to his blogs, Oregon Earmarks Blog and Open the Government News and Issues. These are great examples of a local blogger working toward transparency.

Keep up the great work on the local level. My love of reading blogs cannot be squelched, so please keep recommending local blogs that do a great job talking about local level issues affecting government transparency, ethics and technology.

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