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FAC

A&A: Can CSU lobby for laws that boost their budget?

FAC December 23, 2012

Q: I am working on an article concerning letters CSU sent out that seem to advocate Proposition 30, the California tax initiative that will help reduce cuts to the school system. I had a few questions on the legality of this. A: Your question seems to be whether a public agency may engage in lobbying activity. Although “lobbying” typically refers to communications to legislators urging them to take a particular position on pending legislation, with

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A&A: Does the CPRA allow access to mug shots?

FAC December 23, 2012

Q: Reporters in our news organization deal with several police departments who routinely deny requests for suspect mug shots. Most recently, a mug shot of a driver in a fatal hit and run case was requested. As they always do, the police department denied our request for the mug shot and offered this standard reasoning for the exemption: A: ”Based on your request for ‘the mug shot of the suspect arrested this morning for the

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FAC lawsuit leads to model CPRA policy for dot-gov email

FAC December 23, 2012

Auburn and San Jose are the first cities in California to adopt policies acknowledging the public’s right of access to city officials’ emails about government business–regardless of the kind of email accounts used to send or receive those emails. Emails have long been covered by California’s Public Records Act (PRA), which treats paper records the same as digital records. But public officials wishing to avoid the PRA–often the same officials who most loudly proclaim their

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Does money influence policy? Influence Tracker widget matches dollars to votes

FAC October 24, 2012

Does money influence politicians’ votes on issues?  Now you can keep track of political contributions power in politics from your own website with a web-based embeddable widget that lists the top 10 donors and their contributions to any member of the House and Senate, their opponents, and the presidential candidates. Influence Tracker is a updated project of  Wired.com  and Maplight, the Berkeley, California-based nonprofit dedicated to following money and politics. “Corporate influence in politics has

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How to sabotage California’s Public Records Act

FAC October 15, 2012

By Peter Scheer—If you were looking for a way to sabotage America’s freedom-of-information laws, you couldn’t do much better than a legal strategy being pursued by government entities in two California towns. The public school district of Willows, in Glenn County, and the town of Sebastopol, near Petaluma, have been sued, in unrelated cases, for access to public records–emails of government employees, primarily. These government defendants have vigorously opposed the suits. That, of course, is

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