Matt Stiles introduces the city to the wonders of technology
The Chron's Matt Stiles is singlehandedly determined to bring the City of Houston into the 21st century, and in the process, increase the city's transparency. You may recall back in October, through Stiles' efforts, the city began considering a plan to require all city candidates to put their campaign contributions in an internet accessible database.
Now Stiles has helped nudge the city a bit further:
Elected city officials accepted dozens of campaign contributions that may be illegal under a law prohibiting donations from contractors with business before the City Council, a Houston Chronicle study shows.
Most say they didn't know about potential problems with the donations, in part because legal ambiguities and antiquated record-keeping make it difficult to identify prohibited donors.
[snip]
Officials said the city's arcane record-keeping system makes policing the ordinance difficult.
Many campaigns keep donation records in databases that can be sorted and queried quickly. That is not possible, however, with the blackout lists — the read-only files on the city secretary's Web site.
Campaigns can only identify prohibited contributors by manually searching the lists.
[snip]
Several elected officials said the best way to ensure compliance would be to post the list of prohibited contractors in a more accessible format.
White's aides said they would make the lists available in spreadsheets that can be linked to donations more easily.
You go, Matt! What can he make the city do next?
(While we are on the topic of technology, I'm going to gripe about the Chron's archives, which I find endlessly frustrating. I can't link to Stiles' October Chron story about the city's campaign finance reporting methods, since the original link is now dead. This is always the case with Chron stories. After spending some time in the Chron's archives Advanced Search section, I still couldn't pull it up. Kevin can usually find a way to dig up old stories, but for some reason I don't have that luck, and I don't understand why Chron.com operates this way. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Press don't let their story links go dead like the Chron does, so it is possible to have a more news-reader-friendly system.)
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 12/04/06 09:01 AM | Print |
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