Open Meetings Law

The Alabama Legislature passed a new open meetings law during the regular session earlier this year. Aside from new provisions regarding when a governmental body must meet in public, the law went a step further in specifying methods by which those bodies must notify the public about their meetings. One provision specified that the Secretary of State's office must publish those notices on its web site. The law also says persons must be able to sign up to an e-mail list so they can receive e-mail notices published by agencies they are interested in. The web site and e-mail list had to be functional 1 October. You can access the web site and sign up for the e-mail list here.

The web site as a whole looks pretty good. It's good to see that Worley was able to get it up and running on time. However, for some reason there are some corrections and suggestions for the site:

1) State and local governmental bodies are not "companies." If you click the button to sign up for the e-mail list, you are presented a list of governmental bodies that hold public meetings. Worley has identified those bodies as "companies." I guess her programmers used an application set up for something else but forgot to finish customizing it.

2) The list of governmental bodies (read: not companies, agencies or commissions, etc.) is not in alphabetical order. If you don't see a particular agency or committee in the list right off the bat, look a little closer. The list of governmental bodies is not in good alphabetical order. This is a small point, but there's really no excuse for not having done it. It's not hard to alphabetize a list when populating it. Alphabetizing goes a long way to help the user though.

3) The list of governmental bodies contains an entry for the now-defunct Office of Voter Registration. That agency doesn't exist anymore since its voter registration functions were merged into the Secretary of State's office more than 2 years ago. Seems like Worley would know that, eh?

4) But, while including the Office of Voter Registration, Worley left out the Voter Registration Advisory Board. Perhaps that's no surprise since Worley ignored that body when she was considering a vendor for the new statewide voter registration system.

5) The list of meeting notices is in date order without any way to sort by governmental body. While I imagine a date-ordered list meets the letter of the law, it would be much more useful to the public to have be able to sort by agency or commission names -- if you really want to make the list work for people.

Perhaps Worley can get the site fine-tuned per these suggestions and help folks make better use of the web site.