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@stateintegrity
Any candidate running for the Louisiana Legislature or for statewide office should complete ethics training, says Rep. Stuart Bishop, R-Lafayette.The Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday unanimously approved Bishop's House Bill 365 and sent it to the full Senate for final approval.
The Washington State Public Disclosure Commission today added lobbying data to its online searchable database. Paid lobbyists register with the Public Disclosure Commission before lobbying state government and file monthly reports disclosing their compensation, entertainment expenses, campaign contributions given, and other lobbying-related expenditures.
Before a bill signing ceremony Thursday, individual Iowans had few options for forcing public officials to turn over those public records. Citizens could call the county attorney or the state attorney general — but those attorneys seldom prosecuted even clear violations of those laws.
Citizens could contact the state’s Office of Citizens’ Aide/Ombudsman, but ombudsman staff didn’t have the authority to ensure compliance of the law. So, in far too many cases, open government disputes didn’t get resolved until someone had the time, money and determination necessary to file a lawsuit.
United States Attorney William J. Ihlenfeld, II, announced that he will be taking a new, more aggressive approach to the investigation of public corruption in West Virginia and he is encouraging citizens to join the fight.
Northstar Lottery Group won a 2010 contract to manage the Illinois State Lottery that could enrich the firm by more than $300 million over five years, but a Franklin Center investigation has discovered that irregularities marred the state’s selection process.
The Republican governor has been raising large sums in recent months because the normal limits on campaign donations do not apply from the time recall petitions are circulated until the accountability board orders a recall election to be held. That has allowed Walker to accept as much as $500,000 from one donor -- 50 times the normal limit of $10,000.
As Michael Bender reported for the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald last year, "New data shows Florida has signed contracts worth $1.7 billion since 1995 in return for promises of 225,000 new jobs. But only about one-third of those jobs have been filled while the state has paid out 43 percent of the contracts." The 869,000 jobless Floridians need more from Enterprise Florida than 20,000 jobs created or retained each year.
Don't count on legislators to police themselves
State integrity news for Idaho, from the Idaho Statesman:
Idaho expects, and allows, its 105 citizen legislators to police themselves — to write and enforce their own ethical guidelines.
And that’s one reason why the rules are so weak. It is unrealistic to expect lawmakers to write rules without thinking about what helps or hurts them. That’s why the Legislature has been slow to follow 47 other states that require lawmakers to disclose their finances.
Read the rest of the story at the Idaho Statesman.
Georgia Gov. Deal signs new records law
State integrity news for Georgia, from the Athens Banner-Herald:
Gov. Nathan Deal on Tuesday signed into law a sweeping overhaul of the state's open-records rules, touting the measure as among several legislative successes from this year's General Assembly session.
The measure, which takes effect July 1, reduces the cost of obtaining public documents and stiffens penalties for illegally withholding public information. But it narrows the period of time when the public can scrutinize university president candidates.
Read the rest of the story at the Athens-Banner Herald.
What change do you want from your state's government?
Next year marks the 200th birthday of the term “gerrymander.” The word, which refers to the redrawing of a congressional district to one party’s advantage, was named for Maryland Governor Eldbridge Gerry. Gerry (pictured, right) has since been forgotten, but gerrymandering is alive and well.
With the findings of the 2010 U.S. Census now in the hands of the states, the various legislatures, judicial boards and commissions tasked with redistricting are still in the process of redrawing the next American congressional map. Despite some states’ attempts at fairness and transparency, the practice is not without controversy.
Last week, a U.S. District Court Judge rejected a redistricting map proposed by the Texas state legislature. The judge's ruling leaves the Texas congressional elections of 2012 in a state of flux.
According to a report from Politico, Texas’ new map will either be drawn by a federal court in San Antonio, or by the Texas legislature, which can take another crack at redistricting when it reconvenes next year.
If you’re wondering how districts look when they’re designed through the gerrymandering process, here are 10 strangely-shaped districts throughout the country that are currently represented in the 112th Congress.
There is hardly a normal, natural shape in the bunch: Consider Florida’s Third District, snaking its way up to wrap around Jacksonville; or Illinois’ 17th District, which clings to the state’s west side like moss, and sneaks so far toward the center it encircles the city of Decatur.
When districts are gerrymandered without oversight and public input, it often leaves the map, and the resulting congress, in a strange shape that serves political parties at the expense of the voting public.
These images are courtesy of the National Atlas page, which has depictions of all 435 districts.
If you want to enact change in your community, please e-mail your state's report card to your officials. Reform efforts are already being made, so let your voice be heard!
Why corruption matters in U.S. states
In late 2009 I was catching up at a Starbucks with Bill Buzenberg, the Executive Director at the Center for Public Integrity. I told Bill about some of the interesting research Global Integrity was doing at the municipal, state, regional, and provincial level in a number of countries. But I was frustrated, I said, by the lack of good data here in the United States about how state governments were actually set up when it came to anti-corruption enforcement and deterrence. It was easier for Global Integrity to find teams of qualified researchers in, say, Peru to assess region-level transparency and governance than it was to put together a similar effort in the U.S. states.
I worried that much of the attention in the U.S. at the state level had become too siloed and focused on particular pet rock issue areas: freedom of information, money in politics, open data, and state budgets to name a few. Was anyone looking at the whole picture? Did we have any idea which states were "hardwired to fail" when it came to corruption and governance?
“No,” Bill said. “But let's fix that." And thus the State Integrity Investigation was born.
Today marks an important milestone with respect to the pioneering State Integrity Investigation: we are making pre-publication data -- all 16,500 data points -- available to the public to comment on, raise questions about, and share more than a month before the "official" publication of the project results.
Why did the project partners decide to open ourselves up to this level of scrutiny? It might be helpful to review the history of how this incredible effort came to be.
Global Integrity, one of the three core partners of the State Integrity Investigation, has spent the better part of a decade tracking governance and corruption trends globally, including in North America. We've helped to pioneer some of the more innovative ways of assessing corruption risks and anti-corruption mechanisms at the national and sub-national levels in more than 120 countries by combining journalistic reporting with social science data gathering.
Along the way, we built some technology to help us gather and publish that information more efficiently, which explains how a staff of less than 15 spread across two continents has published more than 10 million words of text and more than 100,000 data points without going absolutely crazy. Those efforts have led to real change in a number of countries by providing both government and non-governmental organizations with solid information that can be used for evidence-based policymaking.
Early on in the project brainstorming, we made several important decisions that are already impacting the public uptake of this project:
We wanted to invest many months into talking to the country's leading experts and advocates focused on state government before developing our methodology. Seventy-five interviews later we had the project's 330 Integrity Indicators.
We wanted to work with the best and brightest experts we could find in each state to gather those data, and that meant recruiting leading statehouse reporters in every state.
We wanted to open the research and reporting process up to the public to ensure our results were as balanced and as accurate as possible. We made early decisions to publish the names of all of the lead reporters in each state, to find engaged and informed citizens to help review the draft data, and to (today) make pre-publication data available for public feedback before the official project launch. Many of those decisions were novel for Global Integrity, and we are anxiously awaiting early feedback to see whether some of this project's experimental techniques can be applied to other efforts.
After all of the hard work by the reporters, project managers, editors, and online community team, a simple reality remains truer than ever: corruption matters in the states because it impacts people's lives. Your state budgets are broken in part because governments have given too many tax breaks to special interests that fund politicians' campaigns. Your roads are crumbling because tenders for infrastructure projects often go to politically connected companies, not those with the most competitive pricing or highest quality. Your elected leaders often operate with impunity because of broken information request systems, gutted state ethics commissions, and patronage controlled civil services.
For all of the attention paid in the past fifteen years to the crisis in governance at the national level in the United States -- from Lincoln Bedroom scandals to Enron to McCain-Feingold, Citizens United, and Super PACs -- we still struggle to understand whether things are better or worse at the state level. That's what we hope this project will answer.
See your state's corruption risk report card and email it your legislators. Together, we can inspire reform.
-- Nathaniel Heller is the Executive Director of Global Integrity.
New Jersey State Police investigate allegations around legislator's traffic stop
State integrity news for New Jersey, from the Newark Star-Ledger:
A State Police trooper pulls over a South Jersey assemblyman one day in February. The lawmaker tries to get out of the ticket, and later complains the trooper targeted him as payback because the Legislature voted to make public employees pay more for health and pension benefits.
The trooper says that after he refused to throw out the lawmaker’s ticket, his own union leaders pressured him to make it disappear as a favor to a "personal friend."
Read the rest of the story at the Newark Star-Ledger.
Iowa Senate considers streaming debate online
State integrity news for Iowa, from the Sioux City Journal:
The Iowa House plans to again stream floor debate over the Internet next session, and the Senate is looking into providing similar coverage. Officials in the House said the effort to improve government transparency has been a success, with up to 100 people at a time logged on to monitor debate.
"I think that's one reason you see fewer people in the gallery, because they can watch it live from their office," said Chief Clerk of the House Charlie Smithson. "It's had a lot of positive effects in terms of openness and transparency."
Read the rest of the story at the Sioux City Journal.
Arizona Senate shoots down bans on lobbyist gifts to legislators
State integrity news for Arizona, from the Arizona Capitol Times:
The Arizona Senate is rejecting a series of ethics measures proposed in the wake of the 2011 Fiesta Bowl scandal.
One of the proposals voted down Thursday would have banned lobbyists from giving free meals to legislators. Others would have prohibited campaign contributions by lobbyists to legislators or candidates for the Legislature and barred legislators from accepting free trips or tickets to sports or entertainment events.
Read the rest of the story at the Arizona Capitol Times.
Washington Supreme Court ruling supports state's 'B-' grade for open records
State integrity news for Washington, from SII partner KUOW:
A recent public radio investigation ranked Washington state second in the nation for government transparency. According to the State Integrity Investigation, only Connecticut did a better job of providing public access to public information.
As one quadriplegic man from Seattle learned, that doesn't mean it's easy to pry information out of Washington state agencies. But Thursday, it got a little easier. KUOW's John Ryan reports.
Read and hear more at KUOW - Seattle.