Moreland Commission Co-chairs: Pass Election Reforms In a Daily News op-ed on Sunday, two of the co-chairs of the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption explained why they recommended public financing as a solution to the persistent problem of pay-to-play politics in Albany. Kathleen Rice, the district attorney of Nassau County, and William Fitzpatrick, the district attorney […]
New Yorkers advocating for an OpenFOIL law here in NYC , were happy to see Tuesday’s 410-0 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in favor of H.R. 1211, the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act (FOIA Act). Alex Howard writes: If enacted, it would commit the reforms to the Freedom of Information Act that the Obama […]
Good Government Groups to Cuomo and Legislative Leaders: Pass Reform Before Budget Deadline Several good-government groups, including the New York Public Interest Research Group, Common Cause, Citizen Action, the League of Women Voters, and the Brennan Center, gathered in Albany on Tuesday to encourage state leaders to enact comprehensive campaign finance reform. Governor Cuomo has proposed numerous […]
In November, the city of Oakland and Code for America officially launched a web site called RecordTrac. This one-stop portal for Freedom of Information Law requests (called Public Records Requests in California, but FOIL requests in New York) gives Californians the ability request records from any city agency in just moments. Many agency web sites […]
Congressmen Support Public Campaign Financing Three members of New York’s congressional delegation announced their support for publicly financed elections this week. U.S. Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Sean Maloney and Dan Maffei held aconference call for reporters along with Karen Scharff of Citizen Action of New York to call for the passage of a bill that would create a public […]
On Monday, the Most Awesome Open Data Site in America, The Federal Reserve’s FRED, published 54,000 new datasets. This brings the total number of datasets available on FRED to a staggering 212,000. At this point, the Federal Reserve has uploaded so much data that this latest batch even includes esoteric datasets like the number of […]
