Today, Open Government Foundation, Inc., announced the ability to check how often New York City and State Legislators vote independently along with viewing past and current legislation, attendance, and voting records at NewYork.OpenLegislation.org.
“We released how often legislators cast what type of votes and how often these votes coincided with their legislative body’s leadership. The numbers show that leadership makes nearly all the decisions for their legislative bodies with only infrequent dissension, even from the loyal opposition,” said Jeff Greenberg, CPA, the organization’s Chief Financial Officer.
“Although Albany has three men in a room and the City has a man and a woman in a room, at least we can vote the Governor or Mayor out of office in both places. Unfortunately, unless you live in the Speaker’s district there isn’t much you can do to have your voice heard by what our numbers show to be the sole decision maker in the legislature,” said Rebecca Green Neale, one of the co-Founders.
NewYork.OpenLegislation.org was created in response to the need for publicly available information about the legislative process and the growing outcry ignited by the Brennan Center for Justice in its 2004 report, The New York State Legislative Process: An Evaluation and Blueprint for Reform. In its 2008 update, Still Broken: New York State Legislative Reform 2008 Update, the Center denounced the secrecy of the legislative process and criticized the unavailability of important legislative information, which can often be obtained only through burdensome, costly requests under Freedom of Information Law. In response to the Brennan Center’s specific request that committees “publish all of their work on the Internet, including attendance records, vote records, and debate transcripts,” Open Government Foundation stepped in to fill the hole that the Legislature has left gaping for years.
“In an open, free democracy it shouldn’t be up to the legislature to decide what information is important enough to be released to the citizens for free,” said co-founder Thom Neale. “Instead, all relevant data should be released in its entirety, and the citizens should be empowered to decide what information they will consume, when they will consume it, how, where and why.”
Open Government Foundation, Inc. (“OGF”) is a New York State not-for-profit devoted to making government transparent, accountable and open by making legislative information available for free over the internet. “Our mission is simple: wherever the state legislature neglects to release critical legislative data to the public, whether through apathy, indifference, or impracticability, we will step in and use every means available to release the information for free ourselves,” added Thom Neale.
