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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