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Peter Scheer

Leading gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown need to show voters, by their own actions, that they are committed to transparency in government. Promises won’t cut it.

Peter Scheer March 9, 2010

BY PETER SCHEER—As California voters begin the process of selecting the next  Governor of the ungovernable Golden State, the leading candidates owe them a demonstration of their commitment to government transparency. All politicians are supportive of open-government “in principle;”  the question is whether they are committed in practice. The best test for that is a candidate’s willingness, before an election, to  disclose information about himself that is not legally required to be disclosed–but that voters

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Reader-comments sections of news websites needn’t be cesspools. Editors should EDIT comments as they would letters-to-the-editor.

Peter Scheer March 5, 2010

BY PETER SCHEER–Some people have no choice but to live in a cesspool. (Consider the young protagonist in Slumdog Millionaire, leaping into a pool of human waste in order to escape a locked latrine.) But news organizations are not among them. The cesspool that many newspapers occupy is the “Comments” sections of their websites. This is the space,  typically following a paper’s own stories and editorials, where readers have their say. If postings to that

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In Separate Moves, State and Federal Courts in California OK Policy Changes Allowing Greater Public Access

Peter Scheer December 18, 2009

BY PETER SCHEER — The courts in California are often criticized for being out of step with the rest of the country. A willingness among judges to deviate from national orthodoxy is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Just this week the administrative arm of the California Supreme Court adopted a rule providing public access to administrative records of all state courts, making California the first state to adopt  a legally enforceable “freedom of information”

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What kind of Governor would Jerry Brown be? Don’t try to check his gubernatorial record. It’s locked up until 2038.

Peter Scheer November 18, 2009

BY PETER SCHEER—-Attorney General Jerry Brown has taken the first formal steps toward declaring himself a candidate for Governor of California. He is, or soon will be, the deja vu candidate in a race to become the deja vu governor. What kind of governor would Brown be? While the resumes of most candidates provide, at best, an ambiguous guide to the policies they would pursue if elected, Brown has a track record that is uniquely

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Court rules CA counties must disclose pension amounts paid to government retirees

Peter Scheer November 6, 2009

Nov 6, 2009—In a case filed by the First Amendment Coalition, the Modesto Bee and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, a California Superior Court has ruled that county governments, upon request, must disclose–by name–their retirees’ pension payments. The Superior Court for Stanislaus County reasoned that the public interest in access to government employees’ pensions outweighs the public interest in protecting the confidentiality of that information. In 2007 the California Supreme Court ruled that government employees’

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