The Caladonian Record ran an interesting piece this past weekend entitled “Public Records Request: Blittersdorf Says Standard Will Cost Him $1 Million.” Although the Record is behind a paywall, the gist of the article was relatively straight forward
The last post had to do with conflicts of interest. This is a follow-up to that but a little but more subtle. There are really three different types of conflicts of interest. Legal conflicts that are clearly defined by ordinance,
Right now the Burlington City Council is deciding whether it should sell Burlington’s homegrown telecom to either an experienced and highly-regarded Canadian corporation (which has offered $30.5 million) or a well-intentioned, but inexperienced and underfunded local group (which has offered
Last week VT Digger had an interesting story about former Attorney General William Sorrell’s “420” license plate. The story was more or less a puff piece based on the double entendre of the plate number itself. (If you don’t know
Democracy is messy. Democracy is hard. But Democracy is hardly messy enough to ask law enforcement to attend a public meeting except in the most extreme of circumstances. And those circumstances do exist from time to time, but from media
The Vermont Supreme Court just issued its long awaited opinion regarding public records in the 21st Century. As my 10th Grade history teacher was fond of saying, “Why do we go to the primary source? Because the primary source is
As previously advertised, yesterday I had the pleasure of observing the inaugural meeting of the Vermont Ethics Commission. As one would expect in a first meeting, most of the discussion was centered around the nuts and bolts of the work
The term transparency has become a hackneyed buzzword as it applies to government. The natural inference is that a transparent government, means an ethical government. But that begs the question, why can’t we just trust that government, made up of
