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Posts tagged as “Public Records”

Public records reforms

12/21/2010: Oregon has good public records and meetings laws. But the State’s Attorneys General who enforce these laws also provide legal representation to state agencies – agencies who often would much prefer to keep the records hidden. Dave Frohnmayer, ironically, was the best of the recent AGs at supporting the…

Failure to Communicate

12/10/2010: The Connecting Eugene group recently made this appeal to the Senate Transparency Committee regarding UO’s delay responding to public records requests about the Trammmel Crow / ORI / Riverfront Research contracts, and UO’s refusal to grant a public interest fee waiver for the documents. Yesterday the committee met to address this complaint.…

Anti-Robot discrimination at UO – with update below

10/31/2010: For our annual Halloween post we take a strong pro-robot position. We are serious.The UO President’s and Provost’s websites have recently added computer code that hides their content from Google and prevents public access to the archives maintained by the Internet Archive. Indexing and archiving services use robots –…

PERS payouts to be public

10/30/2010: Oregon Attorney General John Kroger and his Government Transparency Counsel Michael Kron have been making slow but steady progress improving Oregon’s public records situation – currently rated F. Earlier this month they released the 2010 Public Records Manual with some potentially important re-interpretations of the law. Now, in response…

new rules on transparency

10/26/2010: Back in April UO General Counsel Melinda Grier was fired for her office’s “deficient legal representation” involving, among other things, failure to deal properly with public records requests. Her mistakes cost UO millions. The Attorney General’s investigation alone cost $44,000. Three weeks ago Oregon AG John Kroger and his…

Murk

10/4/2010: I’ve talked to way too many reporters over the years. They would spit in the phone everytime UO’s public records boss Melinda Grier’s name was mentioned. Steve Duin of the Oregonian compared her operation to the KGB. It took a rebellion of sportswriters over the Bellotti payoff to get…

Good news on public records

8/27/2010: I’m no law professor, but I hear this will lead to more openness on public records. Something to do with the economic incentives it creates. Not that I’m an economist. Ironically, the losing side of the case was argued by Melinda Grier’s husband Jerome Lidz, who was Oregon Solicitor…

Denied: The full Bellotti

5/22/2010: Normally when you make a request to the Oregon DOJ for public records, you get a reply from DOJ Attorney Michael Kron, the DOJ’s Government Transparency Czar.  So when I asked for the full report on the Bellotti investigation, I was a little surprised to get a denial from…