SPRING 2007 REPORT
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

Officials now readily post information on the web they once hid
as if life and death depended upon it remaining a secret

Johns Creek wants to be "the most transparent,
the most open city in America"

By Tom Bennett

Decatur, Ga., May 14, 2007 – The Internet is sparking an open-government revolution in cities across Georgia.

For example, there’s going to be a council meeting of some importance tonight in the five-month-old city of Johns Creek, in northeast metro Atlanta. It will take place six hours from now. And here at my home I hold in my hand the entire 226-page packet of pre-meeting documents that Mayor Michael E. Bodker and the six council members will consider.

Not so long ago a citizen in Georgia had about as much chance of seeing beforehand their town council’s packet of issues as they had of being permitted to inspect the storage of bombs inside Fort Benning.  However, I was able to easily download Johns Creek’s packet from its web site today. You say you want proof that something important is going to happen? Well, Mayor Michael E. Bodker and the six other council members will decide whether to sign a letter of intent to form a police department by November 2008. They will weigh 35 alcoholic beverage license applications. I know the names and addresses of the applicants. If I see one whose location strikes me as troublesome, I’ve got six hours to get ready to go to the meeting and complain. And I’m interested in how this and other new cities got startup cash and guidance from the private corporation CH2M; how is that working out? I should find out plenty tonight when Bodker and the council take up a "$54, 500 change order to CH2M contract for potholes."

Within the last two years, three cities in the northern suburbs of Atlanta with a combined estimated population of 150,000 have sprung to life.  They are Sandy Springs, incorporated in December 2005 with a population of 85,000; Johns Creek in December 2006 with 63,000; and Milton in the same month with 20,000. Each city is debuting with a quality of transparency that hundreds of older municipalities in Georgia going back to colonial days never have achieved.

"It all filters from the top, as you know anything does in life," said Rosemary Taylor, who is the public information officer of the City of Johns Creek (and based on that comment, is a bit of a part-time philosopher, too.)  "This is Mayor Bodker’s style. He was very crucially involved with incorporation as a volunteer activist. He cares very deeply about what happens in this part of Fulton County. He always talked at various town hall meetings, at pre-election meetings, about how he saw the city being one day, that it was going to be the most transparent, the most open city in America.

"He completely believes this city should be run like a corporation, and the citizens are the shareholders. You have to have annual meetings (if incorporated), but instead of them, we have them once a week. Michael Bodker ran for mayor without opposition. Once he had announced his intent to run, no one else announced.

"He insists on everything being up on site as quickly as possible. We love the web and are creating a whole new site. It’s going to be upgraded.   By summertime, people will be able to pay all bills online; apply for business licenses; and (post) code enforcement complaints."

Johns Creek has two of the most affluent gated communities in metro Atlanta. They are Country Club of the South and St. Ives Country Club. The residents there probably have in their homes and vehicles every type of high-tech device you can imagine, and won’t tolerate the old atmosphere of secrecy in towns and counties.

"The city’s transparent," Rosemary Taylor told me. "How can you start a brand new city in 2006, and use old methods of communication?"

BRUNSWICK SAYS, ‘WE WANT TO EXPOSE EVERYTHING’

That’s in new Atlanta. How about in old Georgia, in a city so old that General James Oglethorpe established it as a port in 1771, and it incorporated in 1836. I refer to the city of Brunswick in southeast Georgia.

To demonstrate how transparent it has become, I hold in my hand an open record of a momentous decision. The council voted to authorize a member, H.A. Breed Esq., to pay a call upon the city treasurer. Breed was to draw $600 of the citizens’ hard-earned money. And with it, he was to go out and buy a fire engine, plus 900 feet of hose, to fight fires in Brunswick. And all this occurred in a council meeting of June 14, 1838.

In a state where as recently as 1999 a survey turned up disconcerting and even hilarious instances of denial of access to simple council minutes, Brunswick now has on its web site those of the following years: 1838-1842; 1927-1959; 1960-1979; 1980-1989; and 1990 to present.  I asked Roosevelt Harris Jr., the city manager, just who in the staff had the idea to scan these treasures and post them as portable document formats?

"Georgia E. Marion, our city clerk, was responsible for getting that done," Harris said. "We had them all filed and bound. To scan them, we hired a company that had the equipment to do it well."

Harris has a Master’s degree in public administration from Valdosta State University. I asked him, is it best for a city to be transparent and open?  "Oh, yes, by all means," Harris said. "Sometimes you get some pains, these are the pains that come with it and they can go away. On the other hand, if you refuse to be transparent, the pain can be much longer.  "We try to expose everything."

During a 1999 statewide survey, volunteers couldn’t obtain the approved minutes from council meetings that happened that year in the Georgia cities of Colbert and Talbotton. Yet today I read on the Internet minutes of a meeting that occurred in Brunswick in 1838.

Tom Bennett is a retired Atlanta newsman who writes about open government for the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.