Good Government

In a 20-page rebuttal to the December DOI study, BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan said many of the DOI's reform recommendations are inconsistent with how the Board is forced to operate under state law.

He also chewed out the investigators for sending undercover agents -- a move DOI officials have called a standard procedure in a probe of this nature -- to pose as dead or otherwise disqualified voters, and said in the majority of the cases, the city Board had no way to know the people whose names were used at the polls shouldn't or couldn't vote. 

Councilman Ben Kallos asked the city's Law Department today to help investigate what he estimates could be nearly “$4 billion in overspending, on $6 billion worth of contracts."

Kallos, chairman of the Government Operations Committee, made the request during a budget hearing this morning at City Hall, citing a 2012 law that required the City Council to be notified if contracts had significant cost overruns.

Albany, N.Y. – With the dawn of national Sunshine Week on Sunday, good government advocates will intensify their campaigns for more transparency in New York State, where progress in open government is seen as a mixed bag.

The state has made headway in providing online access to public records, but the state legislature and city government are failing to grant greater access to meetings where policy decisions are made.

Freshman Councilman Ben Kallos, representing the Upper East Side, held a hearing Monday as chair of the Government Operations committee aimed at overhauling the application and appointment process to the city’s 59 community boards.

Kallos’ office reported about 1,500 spots were opening across the five boroughs, and that reforms in recent years had been achieved but never standardized.

As part of his continued push to increase transparency in the New York Police Department, Commissioner Bill Bratton announced on Tuesday that the department will open up TrafficStat to more city agencies. The reforms are aimed at meeting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero goal of zero traffic fatalitie

While there was a lot of hype about a report that the NYPD is testing Google Glass, in the short-term a policy-shift toward more accessible NYPD data has the potential to be more consequential for New Yorkers at large.

Council members Brad Lander and Ben Kallos, along with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, are the first New York elected officials to sign up for a new online platform that allows the public to directly ask questions of elected officials.

A comprehensive policy platform created exclusively by advocacy group Manhattan Young Democrats was adopted today by City Council Candidate Ben Kallos for inclusion in his campaigns solutions for a better City.