xenical

Last year it took the Illinois State Legislature less then 15 days to limit the new and improved state when it added exemptions for performance evaluations of teachers, administrators and superintendents.

Other public employees thought this was a grand idea, which lead to , which would exempt all performance evaluations (even though it was allowed even the under previous version of the law). In July, Gov. Pat Quinn , saying that only emergency personnel would be exempted.

But the bill is back from the dead, and expected to be voted on during next weeks veto session. The Illinois Press Association (IPA) is anticipating :

• Representatives could approve the governor’s amendment and send it to the Senate (IPA thinks it’s unlikely)
• The House could override the veto with a three-fifths majority vote (which they need only more to do) and send the bill to the Senate (IPA believe this is possible)
• Or the House could do nothing, which would kill the bill and leave FOIA intact (IPA preferred)

I’m with the IPA, option number three please.

xenical

Elections are over, and as we head towards 2011, I’m wondering which elected officials will be taking a stand to implement transparency.

Literally, I’m wondering, because I can’t find the information anywhere. Here are the few leads I have found:

Obama and Biden continue their trend of showroom transparency. Earlier this week, Biden to discuss stimulus transparency, and the irony did not escape us. Also a new graph showing the Obama administration has not followed through with its promise to “,” posting less then half of them online.

I did manage to dig up a list of and transparency pledges from the United States House & Senate, though I suspect they are incomplete.

But what about at the state and local level? Do you know of any officials who campaigned on transparency and plan to implement it in the new year? We’ll be discussing this and other 2011 predictions for transparency this week during and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you do know of any newly elected officials and their transparency promises please leave their names in the comments. Thanks!

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Gov. office has granting $4.5 million to an Austin company from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. The company is reportedly founded by Perry campaign donor and friend David Nance.

The requested the contract under the . In a letter to the newspaper Monday, the governor’s office said it believes the contract is not public under several exceptions to the law. Perry has requested an attorney general’s opinion on how he should approach the resquest for information, which the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas sees as a : it could take weeks or months before AG Greg Abbot makes a decision.

The contract is with Convergen LifeSciences, Inc. and was signed on August 13. The company has already been paid $2.25 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. Perry’s office has not announced the contract or explained what Convergen does.

“Generally speaking, any contract with the state involving public funds is public information, period,” said Bill Christian, an Austin lawyer who is representing the American-Statesman in the matter.

The letter to the Statesman from the Office of the General Counsel for the governor said the contract should remain secret because it falls under the economic development information exception of the law. But Bill Larsen from the said that exemption doesn’t apply once contracts have been signed.

Perry’s office also said the contract should remain secret because it is covered by exemptions to the public information law covering information related to competition or bidding, trade secrets and certain confidential or financial information.

Exemptions to public information laws do exist and exist for good reason. Learn more about .

xenical

It’s Halloween, and we’re looking to find some dead voters here at Sunshine Review. First off I’d like to thank for giving me loads of help and information on this post.

Here is the basic breakdown of how you find dead voters:

• xenical Get access to the . You can do this by placing a public records request with the government, or, if you are a reporter, by getting the database from the .
• xenical Request the voter rolls and voting history databases for your county or state.
• xenical Import the data into programs like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access. Then clean up the entries, removing or replacing double names, blanks, different spelling for suffixes, etc.
• xenical Join the databases together and see how many exact matches there are on name and date of birth.
• xenical Then see how many close matches you can find (aka maybe the middle name is blank.)
• xenical The resulting database will be a list of possible dead voters. You’ll need to compare these voters with the voting history (make sure to use the earlier date you could cast a ballot) for the past election, which will give you a final list of dead voters.

Finding dead voters is not just about manipulating databases, there is a good amount of legwork involved. Call relatives, track down last known addresses and phone numbers, and xenical that the information is true. There have been many cases of journalists reporting voters to be dead when in fact it was just a database error, so make sure your reporting is accurate.

Texas Watchdog can offer much more in-depth information about finding dead voters and they’ll be joining us this Friday at 2pm EST to discuss it for . I hope to see you there.

Also, little known fact for the below video—they are actually on their way to vote.