A little while ago I blogged about Oregon Legislative Counsel claiming copyright over their revised statute laws and asking sites like Public Resource.org and Justia.org to take down copies of those laws. On June 19th the Legislative Counsel held a hearing with activist Carl Malamud from Public.Resource.org and others to discuss the issue.  Check out the testimony here.   In the end the Legislative Counsel voted to not assert copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutes.

This is a great victory for openness and democracy.  The idea of restricting how people see, use, and collect laws is absurd and I am relieved that Oregon made the right decision.

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I know that Nisha generally covers the local Sunlight topics, but I was quite touched by an email sent by a small-town former Mayor, now turned transparency activist — Darrell Flood. Here are some excerpts from it:

My name is Darrell Flood. I was elected Mayor of Lafayette, Oregon in 2006. It was the first time I had ever run for office. I took office in January 2007. I had a lot of grand plans to make the city better by involving citizens and businesses to work together for a great little city…..After just a few months of being in office, I resigned because the council refused to make the city administrator get a surety bond. It is required by our city charter. I felt that if the council wanted to break the charter I wanted no part of it.

Turns out, resigning was not such a bad thing. I had met with a group of citizens just before leaving office. They were seeing some of the issues that I was running into and wanted me to explain how they could help. Shortly after I resigned, the citizens formed a group. We have been working in our city since April 2007 and we have made some pretty great progress….

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This week I have highlights from Alabama, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.

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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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Last week John Wonderlich posted about the ongoing story of the GAO giving exclusive rights to digitalize legislative histories to Thomson West on the Open House Project blog. The government entering a deal with a private company and giving them exclusive rights to public documents creates a situation where the whole point of digitalization is lost. When large amounts of documents are available on the internet in easy to download formats it’s supposed to increase public access but this situation has the opposite effect. Unfortunately this problem isn’t exclusive to the federal government.

Via Boing Boing and Carl Malamud,

“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.

We’ve sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law perspective and from their own enabling legislation.”

Malamud goes on to state that Thomson West has also made copies of these statutes but haven’t received cease and desist letters from Oregon yet (it was stated that West will be receiving letters). Apparently many states have laws that are copyrighted and this begs the question of how appropriate this kind of copyrighting in an internet age is. How can a law that was written for the purpose of serving the general public not be available to them to reproduce?

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This week I have highlights from Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New Jersey and New York.

In Oregon, Open Government News and Issues, spends some time talking about using Legistorm’s database containing information on privately funded congressional travel. Oregon’s own Senator Smith, and his staff have taken trips totaling $190,000 or more. Rep. Blumenauer has 70 approved trips for a total $156,000.

Pennsylvania’s KeyStone Politics blog highlights a tentative $400 million contract granted to Unisys for managing the state’s data center. Gov. Rendell’s approval of this contract caused a stir in the state house when lawmakers asking why competitive bidding wasn’t considered.

South Carolina Politics Today highlights a new state spending database. The new website allows people to find itemized agency spending by month, as well as year-to-date agency spending by several categories. State expenses are broken-down by whether General Fund, an earmark or federal money was the source of the funding. This data can also downloaded by anyone. Good Job South Carolina!

In New York an interesting conversation is happening between three New York bloggers (Rochester Turning, Fighting 29th, and the Ontario Republican) and the local television station 13WHAM’s blogger about whether bloggers are journalists and traditional media. Read this ongoing conversation about the changing nature of news and media.

Earmark Corner:

Pennsyltucky Politics blog talks about Rep. Todd Platts pledge to not request earmarks. Rep. Platts has claimed earmarks have been used to do some good things for the district but the process of getting them needs to be reformed so he won’t be requesting any in the upcoming appropriation bills.

In South Caronlina, Palmetto State Progressive, reports that Sen. DeMint has supported $30 million in defense department earmarks despite his well known opposition to them.

In New Jersey, Blog the Fifth, has a series of posts on identifying who the recipents are of the $2.5 million in earmarks that Rep. Garrett sponsored. Some digging revealed that $1.5 million, that is for 2kw Military Tactical Generator Improvements, went to Dewey Electronics. The other million, was for Lightweight Munitions and Surveillance System (LMSS) for Unmanned Air & Ground Vehicles, went to Imperial Machine & Tool, Inc. Good sleuthing Blog the Fifth!

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This week I have highlights from Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida and Minnesota.

Oregon’s Earmark Blog posts a CRS report about the Executive Order restricting state agencies from considering earmarks not found in the historical texts of bills. Another example of how useful and informative CRS reports are.

S.D. Watch posted a press release from South Dakota’s Secretary of State Chris Nelson. The press release states that the secretary of state has updated their website to include a free, searchable database of corporate records.

South Texas Chisme posted about how the Harris County government is looking into closing a loophole that allows high ranking officials to not include personal financial information that could cause a conflict of interest.

In Louisiana, Between the Lines, has a post on new ethics reform legislation going through the state senate. The legislation would limit gifts and meals from lobbyists and is being opposed by many lawmakers because it was cause hardship to their legislative life.

KentuckyPolitics.org highlights the Kentucky Senate passing legislation that would require Section 527 groups to disclose their contributions.

Florida’s The Buzz, highlights how the Florida House is now wireless. “Anyone with a wireless-capable computer can pick up a signal now in committee rooms, public areas, etc. No registration is necessary, says Jill Chamberlin, spokeswoman for House Speaker Marco Rubio.” Kudos to you Florida House.

In Minnesota, MinnPost, is using Sunlight’s new Lawmaker Profiler. The Profiler allows you to find campaign contributions, earmarks, federal contracts, and lobbyist expenditures that are associated with a member of Congress. It is a great tool for any blogger or news organization who wants a new innovative way to see congressional data.

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This week I have highlights from New York, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oregon, and Missouri.

In New York, The Fighting 29^th, highlights a great local news story about trying to find information about Rep. Kuhl’s trip to Brazil. The story details the ridiculous steps the reporter had to go through to get basic information about the trip and how the procedure for trip disclosure is incredibly difficult to track.  This is why OpenSecrets.org’s travel database is so essential to find this information.

In Mississippi, Cotton Mouth highlights that on Monday the Mississippi Senate was broadcasted live over the internet for the first time ever.

In Missouri, the Turner Report announced its hall of shame which features the ten Missouri senators who received over $1,000 worth of gifts from lobbyists last year.

Oregon’s Open Government News and Issues blog highlights a CRS Report that covers Congressional Salaries and Allowances and also asks if Oregon lawmakers have an equivalent. It’s great to see CRS reports highlighted when they are available to the public.  OpenCrs.com is a great resource to find more CRS reports that can give people more information that they should know.

Kentucky’s the Rural Democrat reports that Gov Steve Beshear’s ethics reform bill has been passed the Kentucky House of Representatives. The bill includes more whistle-blower protection and changes to giving personal gifts to public servants. The bill also would be prohibit state employees from seeking employment from individuals that the state workers were directly involved with on the job.

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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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