Yes Ken, the City of Dunwoody recently hosted Senior Assistant Attorney General, Stefan Ritter who gave a training session on the new Open Meetings and Open Records law to a large room of elected officials and City Clerk's. Below is the full presentation.
Though I have written on this subject quite a bit and have previously filed many open records requests, I consider the Georgia First Amendment Foundation the go to authority on the subject other than the State Attorney General's Staff.
Check out the informative documents below for the general open records rules as well as those that govern law enforcement and public schools.
I am guessing that once that exclusion is no longer valid the information would have to be released (if officially requested) therefore if you are interested, please contact Ms. Lowery. If you were to ask Ms. Lowery for the document and it was still unavailable, she would tell you the exact exclusion the city is using to hold it back and an anticipated date that it may be available. In this case, though it is an agenda item that I would normally publish, I am only following advice of council and can't officially quote the reason but guessing that it has to do with the still open lawsuit. All that being said, my legal council can't force me to vote on something that I don't believe had a proper public airing.
I hope this information helps.
1 comment:
Mr. Heneghan,
First, thanks for your detailed answer. I will certainly read the provided material.
Second, thanks for what you do publish, proactively and unsolicited.
I share your appreciation of transparency and I wish the City were even aspiring to be as open and transparent as you. While the online apps are wonderful for those with City approved technology, raw data files would go a long way to dispel any notions the data are massaged and allow even ordinary citizens to correlate these data with data from other sources (e.g., traffic citations vs weather at key intersections).
For example, it seems no more difficult to publish the raw data collected by our radar signs than Council meeting minutes. Raw data on police activity might (or might not) warrant some redaction but should be readily available as well. Policies around proactive publishing w/o Open Records requests would seem straightforward with regards to most data collected by the City.
Beyond your own exemplar performance do you sense any enthusiasm within Council or the City bureaucracy to more towards more complete transparency?
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