Ben Cunningham has an excellent post and a link to a media article about Florida Governor Charlie Crist's actions to spread SUNSHINE in the Sunshine state with an "Open Government Bill of Rights."
Shelby County is also spreading some sunshine with several proposals--one of which is to make the business packets that commissioners receive available online to the public.
Hamblen County should follow suit in making its business packets accessible online.
Commissioners in Hamblen County receive monthly committee and commission packets with information about finances, contracts, checks issued, appointments, civil service changes, budget status, school quarterly reports, budget amendments, trustee's reports, and on and on.
These packets could easily be made available online before the meetings. The technology to scan documents onto the Hamblen County website is available. The Hamblen County Court Clerk has recently scanned several years of county commission minutes onto the county website.
[Although the minutes are not in chronological order, some of the pages have been scanned upside down, and minutes of a few months have been left off, County Clerk Linda Wilder is to be congratulated for starting the process. The kinks need to be worked out, but the first steps have been taken.]
While serving as a commissioner, I pushed first for creation of the Hamblen County Government website and then for expanded use of the website to provide online access to public information.
The website needs to add a link now to provide easy public access to Hamblen Commission packets so that citizens can see and review the same information that commissioners receive before monthly committee and commission meetings.
Putting Hamblen Commission packets online would be another step in putting more "sunshine" in local government.
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