Displaying items by tag: Government Transparency Act of 2021

For decades North Carolina has ranked near the bottom of all states in the country when it comes to the public’s right to know what went wrong when a government employee is transferred, demoted, or terminated for disciplinary reasons.

RALEIGH — The 2021 session of the General Assembly began in January, as the world was entering its second year of the pandemic. The hope was the COVID fog would lift, allowing a return to normalcy, at least in a relative sense, and that lawmakers could go about business as usual. 

RALEIGH — N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper signed three bills into law Thursday, Dec. 9, but also vetoed three bills.

The North Carolina General Assembly remains poised to make open government history next week when lawmakers return to Raleigh for the last time in 2021. It has been a while since our legislature has made any meaningful improvement to North Carolinians’ right to know about government action and performance through access to state and local government records and meetings. Now’s their chance.

Who says North Carolina’s state employees and schoolteachers are against transparency?

RALEIGH — A bill that would open disciplinary records of government employees is crawling through the Senate, and employee unions and Democrats are determined to kill it.

With no meaningful state law giving North Carolinians the right to see disciplinary records of those they employ in state and local government jobs, how will we ever know? 

Senate Bill 355, legislation that promotes and enhances public access to the performance records of public employees, is generating significant resistance from various state organizations that have several things in common- they are all union related and they are determined to continue operating without public scrutiny.