By:  Diane Benjamin

The City of Bloomington likes to pretend they are transparent.  They even have a transparency portal on their website:  http://www.cityblm.org/government/transparency

One of the items listed is:

As I’ve written before, the BCPA documents are mostly non-existent unless I FOIA them.  https://blnnews.com/2019/02/14/it-a-secret-bcpa-creativity-center/

These are the event reports currently on the City website, there is one more from June on the second page:  http://www.cityblm.org/government/advanced-components/documents/-folder-1702

Ignoring they are in no particular date order, notice anything else?

No events are listed for December 2018.  Only one event is listed for January 2019.  No events are listed for February 2019.  Also, not all the events held in November 2018 are on the list.

You can page through the BCPA events calendar here:  http://www.artsblooming.org/events/calendar?cury=2018&curm=11&curd=30&curview=month

I filed yet another FOIA request for the missing event reports.  My Request was denied:

The reason listed for the denial is:

The screen shot of the events listed was created this morning for this story. I imagine the missing information will eventually appear since I requested they take another look at what is posted.

The City has another problem with the Transparency Portal:

If you click on Employee Compensation, it will take you to a page listing Total Compensation for numerous years. Calendar year 2018 is not one of them. If you click on the 2018 report you will see at the top of the report it is for 1/1/17 – 12/31/17.

Since W-2 information had to be sent to employees by January 31, the City has the information. The City either isn’t as transparent as they claim or the basics of transparency don’t matter.

Yes, another FOIA was filed.

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