This week the board that oversees the District’s only public hospital, United Medical Center, met for a while in public but then pulled down the curtain and went out of sight. Maybe if your multi-million dollar business had only a few days cash left in its kitty, you’d hide, too. What you couldn’t hear or…
Tag: D.C. Open Meetings Act
DCOGC: Independence of D.C. Watchdog Office Threatened, Coalition Tells D.C. Council
Plans are under way inside D.C. government to change the law in ways likely to disable the Office of Open Government (OOG). The D.C. Open Government Coalition testified February 23 at the annual performance oversight hearing on the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability (BEGA) that includes the OOG.
Proposals in the works at the board could harm the office, according to the Coalition’s government affairs committee chair, attorney Robert Becker. He reported on a text of a bill obtained by the Coalition and under consideration by D.C. officials.
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Novel Lawsuit Headed for First Showdown-DCOOG Seeking Injunction and Penalties for Violations of Open Meetings Act
The District of Columbia, citing the "novelty" of this Open Meetings Act enforcement action, got more time over the holidays for the mayor's Caribbean Community Affairs Commission to figure out its next step in the case. The commission is one of the D.C. mayor's many public advisory bodies, and is alleged to have failed in fulfilling the law's requirements to inform the public in advance about meetings and to furnish a record of each meeting promptly afterwards.
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Transparency Watch: D.C. Schools Task Force to Meet for Two Years, Develop Ideas In Secret
Issues that have been contentious in public about the future of schools in the District seem poised to disappear behind closed doors—including where to put new schools, better sharing of good ideas, reducing student mobility, serving those students not now thriving, and getting better information to families puzzled by the dizzy array of choices. These and more will be on the agenda for a new “Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force,” according to materials released August 19 by Deputy Mayor for Education, Jennifer Niles.
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OMG: Text messages sent by D.C. officials sneak By FOI laws
D.C. government agencies: Kinda open, kinda not
From DCist:
It's been almost two years since the D.C. Open Meetings Act took effect, instituting new requirements that all city bodies and agencies had to follow to ensure that the public had as much access to their work as possible. But how well are those agencies doing in complying with the law?
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