Transparency: Government minutes missing in action

We hear governments boasting all the time about their transparency websites and there is no question that the material that’s posted on the Internet is generally leagues better than in the past.

But we have a gripe. There is one transparency topic that appears to be in deep decline – the recording of meeting minutes for work that takes place in legislative committee meetings, advisory panels, commissions and task forces.

Meeting minutes are a great source of information for journalists, advocacy groups, government officials and interested citizens. Yet they are staggeringly uninformative; the governmental equivalent of empty calories.

Take a look at the agenda and draft minutes from a California Actuarial Advisory Panel meeting on March 10, 2017 (Read more)