Nebraska transparency headlines
From Sunshine Review
This article is a list of transparency related news from Nebraska.
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| Report It • | The Good • | The Bad • | The Ugly | |
Suttle is supporting a budget that hikes the city's property tax rate an estimated 10 percent. Early 2009 when he was running for Mayor, at least two of Suttle's campaign commercials promised, “…to lower property taxes.”
In an early September 2009 city hall news conference, Nebraska Watchdog asked Suttle if he broke that promise. The Mayor did not answer yes or no, but did say that on the third day after the election, May 15th, he was “blindsided” by bad economic news.
On May 15 former Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey announced the latest city sales tax receipts, the numbers of which showed the March 2009 receipts were down $1 million from the previous year. This, Suttle says, drastically changed the city's budget plan.
The January and February 2009 combined sales tax receipts were up $400,000 from the previous year's January and February reports.
Suttle is a former City Council member where he served on the finance committee, overseeing the budget. He says he did not expect the March numbers to fall as they did.[1]
"The University of Nebraska must make public the records of job applicants who are screened in face-to-face meetings, the state's attorney general said in an 2004 opinion.
Attorney General Jon Bruning ordered the University of Nebraska, a public university, to disclose the names of eight candidates it interviewed for the school's presidency. Within hours, university officials complied with the order, which had been requested by the Omaha World-Herald , the Lincoln Journal Star and The Associated Press.
The university had previously made public the records of its four finalists for the presidency, but refused to release information pertaining to four other candidates who were interviewed by its search committee but not officially named "finalists" for the job."
"The Nebraska Supreme Court will determine whether people buried in a former psychiatric hospital cemetery took their right to privacy to the grave with them.
The Adams County Historical Society wants names of the 957 people buried in the Hastings Regional Center cemetery between 1909 and 1957 made public.
The state has maintained that the federal medical privacy law prohibits the release of the names."
"The Associated Press has joined several media associations in filing a "friend of the court" brief supporting a Nebraska historical society's fight to obtain the names of 957 people buried in a former psychiatric hospital cemetery.
A 2007 lawsuit filed by the Adams County Historical Society contends that Hastings Regional Center's burial logs are public records and should be available for viewing."
"A recent dispute that had the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's administration giving the silent treatment to the Daily Nebraskan, the school's newspaper, may have been resolved.
Talks and e-mails between UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman and Daily Nebraskan Editor in Chief Brian Hernandez appear to have smoothed relations between the university and paper. The two have been at odds over numerous requests for public records made by the newspaper to the university."
"The relationship between a university and its student newspaper is typically one of give and take. Some of this professional courtesy, however, has fallen to the wayside at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
In response to numerous sweeping Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by The Daily Nebraskan, the university is now denying student reporters direct access to top administrators for interviews. All information and comment previously sought from these individuals must now be gathered from the institution’s public relations office."
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