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 Pennsylvania, Tennessee, New Jersey, Maryland, and Louisiana.
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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 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 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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This week I have highlights from Utah, New Mexico, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

In Utah, Jen’s Green Journal discusses the undeclared conflict of interest for State Reps. Mike Noel and Aaron Tilton. Reps. Noel and Tilton are both on the Public Utilities and Technology Committee and the Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee (apparently these are two different committees). The conflict of interest is that these committees are considering a motion that would approve building a nuclear reactor in Utah. The conflict is spelled out at Deseret Morning News “Rep. Tilton is an owner of Transition Power Development, a private equity group that has signed an agreement to secure water rights for a nuclear power plant. If approved by water regulators, the plant’s enormous water demands would be supplied by the Kane County Water Conservancy District, whose executive director is Rep. Mike Noel.” In other words these two lawmakers would benefit from the building of a nuclear reactor and should probably declare a conflict of interest.

New Mexico Politics with Joe Monahan talks about how since Sen. Domenici, announced his retirement the Senate Ethics Committee has decided not to go to the next stage of the investigation into his involvement in the US Attorney General scandal.

South Dakota Politics blog has been talking about the farm bill recently and more specifically the $1.1 billion in subsidies that went to 172,801 dead people between 1999 through 2005. The discussion went into depth about whether these farmers were vampires or zombies. You be the judge.

In Tennessee, Nashville City Blogs talks about whether part of the comprehensive state ethics bill is constitutional. Attorney General Bob Cooper says that the section regarding the political activities of family members of the Registry of Election Finance is unconstitutional. The current law prohibits them from participating in campaign activities, running for office, and lobbying. AG Cooper said that these bans are too harsh since these activities don’t really convey a conflict of interest with the Registry of Election Finance.

In Arkansas, The Citizens Journal blog talks about how some Arkansas officials are being sued by two reporters for violating the state’s Freedom of Information Act by withholding information about which government computers were used to edit entries on Wikipedia. The complaint asks the officials to reveal what computers were being used to edit Wikipedia entries on Republican presidential candidates. It is an interesting case of Web 2.0 technology and how it affects transparency and FOIA.

That’s all I got this week. Thank local bloggers for shining the Sunlight.

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In the wake of a scandal that brought down two Tennessee lawmakers and ensnared two more, the Tennessee Legislature passed ethics reform legislation and sent it to Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) to sign. Bredesen called the reforms, “a big stone in the foundation of restoring the public’s confidence,” according to the New York Times. The reforms include the creation of an independent ethics commission, limits to “wining and dining of lawmakers, forbids lobbyists from giving directly to candidates’ campaigns, limits cash contributions to $50, and requires more detailed and more frequent financial disclosures from candidates and elected officials.” Some were disappointed that the reforms left out more sweeping measures such as the public financing of elections.

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