Sunshine Week

People around Riverhead are always telling us they don’t know what they’d do without us here to keep them informed. We appreciate that so much. Unfortunately, too many communities across NY have no local news source reporting on local issues. And the numbers keep shrinking.

"[A] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps, both,” James Madison, Father of our Constitution" warned.

According to academic studies of communities that lost their local newspapers, government became more inefficient, civic engagement and voter turnout declined and — get this — the cost of municipal borrowing went up. That’s what happens when the press isn’t around to fulfill its role as government watchdog.

The town needs a more comprehensive code of ethics as well as rules to govern the conduct of public officials presiding over adjudicatory hearings. These are steps that will institutionalize transparency and act as guardrails to protect the public interest.

It's hard to have confidence in the crime reports you compile when the information provided by police is inconsistent and incomplete.

Public notices are a basic building block of government transparency, yet an archaic state law mandates their publication in a medium that fewer and fewer people are using: print newspapers. The result is a big problem for government transparency.

By law, most government documents are public documents, accessible by the public, as they should be. Nevertheless, many government officials — especially the lawyers — behave as if national security is at stake and they work for the CIA. 

Local governments have come a long way in achieving transparency in public meetings, in large measure thanks to technological advances and the internet, but they've still got a long way to go.

After nearly 20 years of local news reporting, I could fill a book with stories of government officials trying to prevent reporters — and hence, the public — from finding out what they’re up to.

Riverhead Town got a top score on a report card issued today by the Press Club of Long Island, following a 16-month audit of 195 county agencies, cities, towns and villages in Suffolk and Nassau. The Village of Greenport scored a 'C'.