Dec 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Incrementalist Idea of the Day
This is hardly a policy issue of earth-shattering importance, but David Alpert’s right that it sure would be nice if the District of Columbia put all the official review filings pertaining to new developments online. And, of course, much the same applies to other states and municipalities. In this day and age, really anything that any government agency makes available to people who show up at an office and ask to see a paper copy of ought to be made available online. It’s just common sense that information available to the public should be made available to the public in the most convenient way.
29 Responses to “Incrementalist Idea of the Day”
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December 22nd, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Oh you’re a sly one Mr. Y.
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
This is bullshit.
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
You assume the government agencies have any interest in making these convenient. My guess is they’re quite happy to make it difficult to find information that is required to be “publicly” available,” as in the famous scene from HHGttG:
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
If a centrist think tank were to advance this suggestion, some might consider it to be–well–some sort of bovine fecal material characterized by repeted minor changes undertaken with an excess of caution.
If only there were a better phrase to describe that!
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I work for the City of Los Angeles, and when I publish an Environmental Impact Report, I put it up online, I have CD copies available for purchase in the office, and I have hard copies available at four local libraries and at City Hall. I put a notice in the L.A. Times and I mail out notices to everyone living within a 500-foot radius of the project, everyone who had previously commented on the project, and a variety of responsible agencies.
I’ve still gotten complaints about availability.
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:10 pm
THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund!!!
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Adam,
That’s great for a full EIR, but there are a lot of smaller projects that don’t get EIRs. It seems like it should be simple to have a searchable database where you could look up any pending development project by the address and view all the docs related to it.
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
EIRs are what I work on on a daily basis; published MNDs are also available online. The City has other systems available to look up any available cases that have been approved for a site. I’m not sure if the system for looking up pending cases is available for the public.
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:18 pm
In this day and age, really anything that any government agency makes available to people who show up at an office and ask to see a paper copy of ought to be made available online.
In this instance, it’s not an issue, but there is a privacy objection that can be raised to applying this principle broadly. Certainly making businesses who want to sell information about you spelunk through a file of papers at a hall of records increases the cost of invading your privacy versus making it all available online. And there’s some very personal information that is contained in many public records.
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:25 pm
In this day and age, really anything that any government agency makes available to people who show up at an office and ask to see a paper copy of ought to be made available online.
In some small minority of cases, I think it makes sense to keep a bit of friction in the process — mostly in the area of personal privacy. Should a prospective employer or potential first date really get to to voyeuristically comb through your divorce settlement and history of parking violations? There are justifiable reasons for making divorce settlements and misdemeanor criminal records available for someone committed enough to spend some shoe leather on finding them out about you, certainly. But it shouldn’t be ENTIRELY effortless.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:08 pm
the idea makes sense if you add “.. for money”. Otherwise, maintaining, tagging, updating and purging those documents of potentially private information creates a lot of work for little benefit and the potential for abuse. Keeping the stuff offline is cheaper, better from a privacy POV and enables oricing according to demand.
That said, I love free information online, but this is an area where I can’t expect the public to finance and support my – weird – preferences.
December 22nd, 2008 at 8:39 pm
It is kind of worrying that Yglesias has noticed the guest post on his blog only at this time in the history of earth and mandkind. I mean, no wonder the spelling errors never get corrected. At least Jennifer corrected hers!
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
A number of good points up above that I want to expand upon:
First of all, most munis don’t have the resources for what Matt’s calling for. It’s very common for planning departments to be ~20% below their nominal staffing, and for nominal staffing to be inadequate. Following up on that, since the vast majority of the docs Matt is talking about come to the muni in paper format only, you’re looking at vast amounts of scanning, e-filing, and putting online – probably a full time job for every 150k of muni population*, esp. since time is of the essence (a small development that requires minimal variances moves through the public process in a month or so, so things need to get online within days of filing). Some of this stuff could be streamlined, and that would be great, but you need a revenue stream. I haven’t heard a lot of demands from the public that filing paperwork with municipalities be made more expensive and/or onerous.
Second of all, the privacy issue is pretty big. Our county put all assessments online about 8 years ago, and about a year ago removed the ability to search by name – there’s simply an awful lot of info that should be effectively private in a real estate record. It’s one thing for that info to be accessible by anyone who wants to go dig for it, quite another for it to be at everyone’s fingertips.
Third, given the caveat that I’m married to a (ex-)bureaucrat, I’d disagree pretty strenuously with Tony’s characterization in 3. “Government agencies” are generally staffed by civil servants who are being paid less than they’d earn in the private sector but work in the public sector because they believe in public service. Some of them may grow to dislike the public (which, in case you haven’t noticed, includes of a lot of assholes), but few of them are trying to pull a fast one on the public. That said, there are certainly elected officials who feel more or less as Tony implies. Sadly, IME, goo-goo candidates for elective office don’t get a lot of support from the public, who’d rather vote for pols who “get things done” by subverting public processes.
* I say this as an architect married to an ex-city planner; I have a pretty good sense of how many publicly-accessible projects come through those offices each day.
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