Saturday, June 11, 2016

SF Public Advocate Legislation Now Online

Patrick Monette-Shaw is an accomplished, tremendously effective and ardent public records and open govt advocate, and he should be cloned. We need more citizens like him holding City Hall accountable and making it more transparent.

He recently obtained important documents about creation of a public advocate, an idea I basically support at this time, that may go before the voters in November.


I've posted the 36-page proposed charter amendment here. This is Patrick's introductory note about obtaining these public records:

"On Wednesday, May 25, the San Francisco Examiner published an article indicating that Supervisor David Campos had introduced at the Board of Supervisors the day before his Charter change proposal to create an elected Public Advocate position in San Francisco.

"At 10:38 a.m. on Wednesday, I placed an Immediate Disclosure Request for Public Records with Campos requesting a copy of the legislation. Campos opened and responded to my e-mail request within three minutes at 10:41 a.m. saying he would have a member of his staff forward me the language.

"Congratulations to Campos for taking IDR's seriously. I hope you will support this legislation. One of the key features is to place the City's whistleblower program under the Public Advocate, finally giving the whistleblower program more teeth than it had been getting split between the Controller's Office and the Ethics Commission.

"I will be support the Public Advocate legislation for that reason alone, although there appears to be many other substantive benefits to such an elected position."

No comments: