The Mendocino County grand jury recently released a report on the county’s progress in making public documents available as required by the Public Records Act.
With one exception, we think the county has made significant improvements in its methods of helping taxpayers find out about what’s happening in the halls of county government.
The big exception is that the county still has a bad habit of asking people to make their requests in writing. That is illegal. If someone is standing at a county department front desk and asking to see a record, the county may not ask that person to fill out a form. The county’s online requesting form does require an email and asks for name, address and phone number, but does not require those. So if you want your request to be handled by email, obviously you’re going to have to give the county your email, but you don’t have to give a name or address.
What we like about the county’s new system is that it has put all the PRA requests and the county’s responses on its web site for everyone to look at. It’s an interesting list of requests and anyone may find interesting nuggets of information there.
The grand jury also looked at the county’s record-keeping system and was not as enthusiastic. The county has not really looked at record keeping since it adopted a new policy back in 1993. We are hoping the county will work swiftly to get its records digitalized and made available to the public for searching and also that the county will find a central storage facility for old county records that can be searched at the very least by employees easily. We would hate to see the county destroying historic records without preserving them in some form, for future generations.
April 17, 2016
Ukiah Daily Journal
Editorial
No comments:
Post a Comment