Police at the scene threatened to arrest the journalist if he didn’t leave. Of course, the journalist was the last person that needed to be threatened by police. Perhaps the police should have threatened the assemblyman and compelled him to acknowledge .

Several things I’ve learned through , our weekly Twitter conference on Freedom of Information issues, come to mind. First, video cameras will bring out the worst in public officials and their staff as far as secrecy goes. But few will object to, or notice, a voice recorder. For many reasons, video is far superior to just voice recording, but it is better than nothing. Second, the fact that Mike Gatto is acting like a diva is a story in itself. If this were a special on VH1, it would be understandable why he wouldn’t want unexpected cameras. But as an elected official, paid by taxpayer money, he has no right to exclude journalists (and thereby exclude his constituents) from public meetings. This is a story on it’s own right, and had he let the journalist in the meeting, the journalist probably wouldn’t have found anything as worthy of reporting as Gatto’s power trip.

Lastly, people are becoming a part of government accountability, and officials should embrace this and learn to work with citizens instead of trying to push us out. We’ve talked about the benefits to governments and citizens alike to . Officials can benefit by having justifications for their decisions available and they can also see a decrease in . The benefits to citizens are obvious.

It won’t work to keep us out, we’re already in. Officials need to get with the times and include us in the conversation, or suffer the wrath of informed citizens.

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Over at the WikiFOIA blog, they’re talking about the :

This issue of justifying the recording of open meetings came up during one of our weekly Friday FOIA chats. During this chat, the participants of FOIA Friday also developed a laundry list of reasons most of which help to overcome the justifications of the Chicago area school boards [who have stopped posting meetings].

The blog includes a long list of reasons governments should archive their videos online. The reasons taken together should be enough to help governments overcome anxiety about making their meetings easily accessible.

Be sure to checkout for updates on issues and legislation. Also, join us on Twitter every Friday from 2-3 EST for , our live conference on FOIA issues and the original source of the discussion on open meetings.

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Last Tuesday, May 11, the Senate State Affairs Committee spent nearly three hours discussing how the emergence of social media has changed the way governmental bodies conduct public business.

These new tools can be used by elected officials to better communicate with constituents. But as Keith Elkins, a former Capitol reporter and now executive director of the , noted, elected officials could also use their cell phones, Blackberrys, laptops, and personal computers to communicate with one another in secrecy, outside of the state’s and the. He isn’t the first person to worry about this. Jason Stverak, president of the , worried earlier this month about the lack of archiving in new media: while public officials are more available to their constituents, the are also more available to each other through means that .

Senate State Affairs Committee chairman , R-, recommends the address how elected officials use the Internet to assure the public that no one is using the technology to or the Public Information Act. He also said public officials should not live in fear of being accused of violating the Public Meetings Act if they use electronic devices to communicate with others.

I wrote last week about the . Last year, four cities and some 20 local officials from across the state filed a federal lawsuit, supported by the Texas Municipal League, arguing that the penalties for violating the Act are harsh and unconstitutional. These penalties includ six months in jail and a fine of up to $500.
“We’ve got some good folks who are threatened with jail by innocent remarks or e-mails” said Mayor and League president Debra McCartt.

Of course, there are consequences for a law that isn’t strict. The improvements that went into effect this year have sought to remedy by setting up strict deadlines for compliance, and severe penalties for failing to do so.

It seems the answer is for Open Meetings Laws to explicitly state what is and isn’t acceptable, and to make clear what the exemptions to the law are. These laws need to address changing technology. It isn’t fair to officials for them to be unclear about whether their Tweet breaks the law, and it isn’t fair to citizens to be unable to access a Tweet relating to public business. Lastly, breaking the law needs to come with penalties that are strict enough to induce compliance.

Join us tomorrow on Twitter from 2-3 Eastern Standard Time to talk about Texas Open Meetings Law and open meetings laws in your state. Use hashtag #FOIAchat to talk to other transparency advocates about questions you may have or your experiences with open meetings. (If you can’t make it, our discussions are always .) For a topic schedule, look .

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Taxpayer money helps fund a lot, more than taxpayers know about. Cities use taxpayer-money to lobby states and the federal government (a practice called ““). Anything that government does should be open to the government, that is our stance. Unfortunately, this practice is anything but open and there is little information available on it and .

And taxpayer-funded lobbying associations are making it so that government is less open. In , the is under assault. The is behind an effort to get .

To put this into perspect: Texas citizens are funding an organization, which is encouraging Texas cities to sue the state, which are suing the state using the money of Texas citizens in order to prevent these citizens access to government meetings.

We’ll make sure to continue following this story. And make sure to tell us what you think.

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Yesterday, I wrote about the strides being taken in into the state’s plans. But Maryland doesn’t have a completely pristine record on the matter, according to some.

An editorial in the this week called the The author of the editorial has experience with Anne Arundel, which he recognizes as having “an award-winning Web site [that] happily provides tons of noncontroversial information.” The author had experience with requests, and in turn faced intimidation and incompetence from the county’s staff on several ocassions. Another problem he noticed was very lax compliance to the , like the lack of a public notice to alert the public of special meetings and a lack of responsiveness from county officials when the problem was brought to their attention.

The Post article concludes with the recommendation that local governments adopt legislation similar to the federal Public Online Information Act of 2010, which would make all documents subject to a Public Information Act request be online and free to the public from the moment of their creation.

I’ve also written about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s mixed transparency record. The governor, like the state of Maryland, has some people lauding his transparency accomplishments, and others saying they are less than perfect. Apparently, his lack of follow-through on his transparency promises has landed . That is the consequence of not addressing transparency concerns.

Whether the problems found in are generalizable to the rest of the state is yet to be determined. However, good transparency recommendations should be addressed, regardless of their premises. Our friends at the have been saying for awhile, the sentiment echoed by the Post editorial, and this may be the opportunity for Maryland to lead the way.

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We always like to encourage citizens to get angry and demand the information that is due to them, because the government will hardly ever . Usually, citizens have more at stake in demanding information than public officials, who often see open records and open meetings laws as burdens.

In and around Vermont, however, public officials stepped up to the plate to make government open.

When the (NRC) scheduled a closed-door meeting with public officials to discuss the recent safety problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, it was congressional leaders in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont who sent letters and made calls to NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, expressing and asking him to consider making the meeting open. Vermont officials expressed their concerns, as well. Attorney General Deb Markowitz called plans for the closed meeting “legally questionable and ethically repugnant,” given it dealt with public health issues. Senators Bernard Sanders Patrick Leahy and Representative Peter F. Welch, issued a joint statement saying they were “committed to open and transparent government and to honoring both the letter and spirit of Vermont’s open meeting laws,” and urged the commission chairman to move the meeting back to Vermont and comply fully with Vermont’s open government law. “Avoiding Vermont’s open meeting laws by holding this meeting in New Hampshire will only add to the growing public skepticism about the handling of oversight at Vermont Yankee, and could curtail participation from Vermont officials,” they wrote.

The congressmens suspicions are well founded, as Vermont citizens do not have the most positive view of the openness of their government. An editorial appearing in the Burlington Free Press makes the charges that :

* Too many exceptions to the and , , , , , , ,