Gov. Cuomo May Oppose Senate Coalition if Public Financing Isn’t Passed Governor Andrew Cuomo implied this week that he may oppose the ruling Senate coalition of Republicans and Independent Democrats this coming fall if the chamber does not pass public campaign financing. “If public finance is not passed by the end of session, I will […]
In a rare turn of events, a data miner is mapping the relationship between corporations, instead of engaging in the data vivisection that individual Americans are subject to every time they go online. Enigma.io, a new member of the Data Transparency Coalition, is a search engine devoted to making sense of the jumbled public data […]
NY Times: Gov. Cuomo Must Put His Words into Action Last week, the New York Times pressed Governor Cuomo to put his words on reform into action. Under the status quo, special interests reign supreme in Albany, the editorial stated. Incumbents face little competition because they can easily flood their war chests with sky-high contributions. […]
It’s not huge or transformational, but the New York State Comptroller has joined the Governor in taking another step towards establishing a new open government convention for New York: machine-readable fiscal information. State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli recently began publishing monthly cash reports in a Excel format. The cash reports show revenue and spending both to […]
Gov. Cuomo Discusses Passing Reform This Session with Activists Under mounting pressure from good-government groups, unions and the Working Families Party, Governor Andrew Cuomo met with advocates of campaign finance reform to discuss passing publicly financed elections before the end of the state legislative session in June. Cuomo said he wants his eulogy to list […]
New York City’s creaky and opaque Freedom of Information Law process will soon get a long-overdue transparency and efficiency makeover. Council members Ben Kallos and James Vacca, on behalf of Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, introduced an OpenFOIL bill, Intro 328-2014, at today’s City Council Meeting. OpenFOIL builds on recommendations made by Public Advocate Bill […]
NYC Councilman Ruben Wills was indicted today by NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for a fraudulent scheme in which he stole somewhere between $3,000 and $33,000 in state legislative member items steered to his non-profit by his political crony State Senator Shirley Huntley. (Huntley was previously indicted for other frauds, and wore a wire for over […]
Is this transparency? It’s 2014, and there are 13,000 pages of MTA and 2,300 pages of NY Power Authority procurement reports published online as PDF format images; these reports cannot be searched by a computer, cannot be viewed in a spreadsheet or database,and cannot be Googled. The procurement reports detail the tens of billions of […]
