Archive - 2010
February 26th
Public Notices and Covering The News
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/26/2010 - 12:09Last year, the Connecticut General Assembly considered An Act Concerning Posting Legal Notices on the Web Site of a Municipality. The goal of this legislation was “to relieve municipalities of costly mandates by authorizing the posting of legal notices on municipal web sites.” The bill made it though the Government Administration and Elections Committee and the Planning and Development Committee but didn’t get any further.
This year, it is back as part of An Act Reducing Costs to Municipalities with a goal of implementing the Governor's budget recommendations. This time, it seems to be getting even more attention. CT Mirror quotes Jim Leahy, executive director of Connecticut Daily Newspapers Association, who claims that “There’s no question some newspapers would go out of business” if they lost the income from these legal notices.
Paul Bass commented on the article saying
Print papers have had a scam going for decades: way overcharge for legal notices that nobody reads.
Politicians allowed them to do it because they didn't want to anger corporate monopoly publishers. They wanted good press.Now the corporate owners that fleeced the public (including cash-strapped governments and low-income people filing legal notices at exorbitant rates) want the public's sympathy. They want a bail-out. And ill-gotten money to keep their dying business models afloat a little longer.
George Gombossy, who has also made the transition from print to digital writes in his article, Newspaper Bailouts: The Truth Comes Out, Ct Newspapers Need Paid Public Notices To Survive:
If Leahy wants a bailout for newspapers he should ask for it instead of leading a massive PR effort to fool taxpayers and the General Assembly into thinking that requiring the spending of millions of dollars a year in public notices in newspapers somehow protects democracy any more than posting the notices on the Internet.
Yet we need to wonder if George and Paul have additional unspoken concerns. Other online news publishers have commented to me about how they wish they could get a little bit of the public notice gravy train. Currently, it is reserved just for print newspapers.
We also have to wonder about the motives of some of the sponsors of the bill. In 2009, some of the same people advocating allowing municipalities to post notices on their websites instead of in local newspapers also supported An Act Concerning Posting of Information on Municipal Websites. The goal of the legislation was to “delay the implementation of the mandate on municipalities to post information on web sites.” It seems like they only want to post stuff on municipal websites if they absolutely have to.
Likewise, some of these same people have opposed making public funds available to candidates running for state office that the candidates can use to inform the public about the issues and their stances on the issues. Perhaps they just don’t want people to know what is going on in the state.
Given the upheaval in the news and the electoral processes, we need to continue to seek new ways to make more government information more accessible in less costly are more efficient ways. Perhaps instead of simply doing away with the requirement that municipalities publish notices in local papers, we should allow them to publish them on online sites as well, providing the online sites get sufficient traffic. Municipalities that have vibrant websites might be able to use their own websites. Municipalities with lackluster websites that do not attract traffic might find it more efficient to post their notices on some of the online news sites that are rapidly growing in the state.
Then there is the question of who will cover local news if this important subsidy is taken away from local news organizations. Perhaps the proposed change in requirements should only apply in those communities that have a basic level of coverage of boards and commission meetings and other town events. Towns could help meet this requirement by making sure that many of their board and commission meetings are broadcast on government access television as well as encouraging local bloggers and citizen journalists to cover town meetings.
The way news is covered in our towns and cities is rapidly changing. We need to find ways to make sure that with these changes we don’t end up with less information being available to residents and voters. At the same time, with a little Yankee ingenuity, we can perhaps promote competition, better coverage and even save municipalities important tax dollars.
February 25th
Animal Welfare in Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/25/2010 - 18:37There are several important developments concerning Animal Welfare in Connecticut that deserve special attention right now.
Parvo
Topping the list is the parvo outbreak in southwestern Connecticut. According to Stratford's chief Animal Control Officer Rachel Solveira it is the worst outbreak in over fifteen years. According to an article in the NewsTimes, “The Stratford and Fairfield animal control centers both had to be quarantined twice in recent months after the disease erupted among their dogs.”
Dog owners should check to see that there dogs have been vaccinated. Typically dogs get a combination vaccination for distemper and parvo. These vaccinations typical cost around $20 and if all dogs were vaccinated, it would put a quick end to the outbreak.
An Act Concerning Certificates of Origin for Dogs...
Today, I also received the opportunity to follow up on my blog post about An Act Concerning Certificates of Origin for Dogs Sold by Pet Shop Licensees. I had attempted to contact the Department of Agriculture several times and received no reply. Yesterday, Legislative Program Mgr., George E. Krivda, Jr. called while I was visiting clients. This morning, I had the opportunity to speak with him extensively about the problems I have had emailing the Department of Agriculture as well as about the bill.
The problem with my emails not being responded to appears to be a technology glitch that has been referred to the Department of Information Technology.
In terms of the Certificate of Origin act, I received a lot of valuable information from different several sources. Public Act No. 09-228 went into effect last July. During this period, the Head of Animal Control took early requirement and it was sometime before the replacement was named and the program was implemented.
Currently, there are 128 Pet Shop Licensees in Connecticut that this law applies to, although it is not clear how many of them actually sell dogs. It is estimated that approximately 10,000 Certificates of Origin will be filed each year, with the majority coming in by fax. Currently, there is no ability to file the certificates electronically and there is no provision for the Department of Agriculture to produce reports summarizing the certificates.
At the public hearing Connecticut Votes for Animals (CVA), which opposes bill 5118 describes the original bill that created this requirement as the Puppy Mill Law. They say that “the purpose of the Puppy Mill Law was to prevent the sale of puppy mill dogs in Connecticut”. They raise a concern about the certificates being accessible under the Freedom of Information Act. The proposed legislation, they argue, would make the certificates only available to the Department of Agriculture when visiting Pet Stores, and not available to activists, or for that matter, reporters, investigating trends in animal populations.
Yet retrieving the 10,000 faxes through Freedom of Information Act laws, and analyzing them could be a difficult and expensive endeavor. To address some of this, “CVA has publicly pledged its resources to the Dept. of Ag. in order to ensure that Certificate of Origin information can be filed with the Department of Agriculture.”
A better option might be to enable and require electronic filing of Certificate of Origin information. This information could then be easily accessible by an interested party. While the state is short of funds, it may not have the resources at present to create this as part of the State Department of Information Technology infrastructure. However, building a sample form like this on Google Documents is quite easy, and I’ve set up an example:
CT Certificate of Origin Form (The Department of Agriculture is welcome to use this form if it serves their purposes.)
It may be that the legislature could temporarily suspend the filing of Certificate of Origin forms with the Department of Agriculture until such time that the Department of Agriculture has an electronic filing system in place, provided that the forms are not only kept by the Pet Shop Licensees, but that they are available through the standard Freedom of Information Act provisions, with the Pet Shops needing to provide the information to any third party that asks.
Any bill that makes the gathering and dissemination of important information more efficient, especially in these days of fiscal constraints seems like a good idea to me.
It has also been suggested that this legislation be modified to apply not only the Pet Shop Licensees, but also to rescue organizations bringing animals into the state. While there are some great animal rescue organizations that should not have an issue complying with this, there are other more questionable groups posing as animal rescue organizations to avoid complying with laws applying to Pet Shop Licensees.
An Act Prohibiting the Unreasonable Confinement and Tethering of Dogs
Another bill that was introduced, and yesterday was referred to the Joint Committee on Environment is An Act Prohibiting the Unreasonable Confinement and Tethering of Dogs. This bill would more clearly define what is reasonable confinement and tethering of dogs and raise the fine for confinement or tethering that is not deemed reasonable. The ASPCA and CVA has concerns about some of the language of the bill and will provide suggested revisions to interested parties and at the public hearing on the bill.
Legislators for Animal Advocacy
It was also announced today that
State Representatives Annie Hornish (D- Granby) and Alfred Camillo (R-Greenwich) announced today that they will co-chair the newly formed "Legislators for Animal Advocacy," a bipartisan organization committed to raising awareness of animal welfare issues.
Reps. Hornish and Camillo both serve on the Environment Committee which will be considering bills 5118, 274 and others affecting animal welfare.
#meego Community Website Meeting
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/25/2010 - 10:41Yesterday, members of the #meego community gathered in an IRC channel to discuss what sort of services the community needed. It was a well attended covering topics from build services and repositories to forums and mailing lists. Every once in a while the discussion would drift off into religious views about one system or another but the meeting was well run and rapidly brought back to the topic at hand.
According to the logs, forty-five different people spoke at the meeting, which hopefully brings a broad representation of the community as a whole. However, since it was on IRC and talking about the details of the services provided, it may well have been a self selecting crowd that left out the largest and most important group, the end users. Many of the decisions being made are likely to affect end user experience, and I believe many of the end users really don’t care a lot about whether or not a given application is completely open source, or if it depends on components that are not open source. I suspect that many of them, likewise, aren’t especially concerned with whether or not the people doing quality assurance are third party people that have access to read the source code or not. However, these seemed to be the issues that many in the meeting were most interested in.
The importance of the distinction between the developers perspective and that of end users was brought home to me by an article in Rethink Wireless today about a TNS report that found users are now swayed by apps as much as carrier brands.
Every day, I receive emails from various organizations launching new applications for the iPhone asking me to review and blog about the applications. I always respond with a question about their plans to be made available on other platforms. Typically the response is that maybe they’ve considered porting the application to Android at some point, but they’ve either never heard of, or not seriously considered porting to the N900, Maemo or MeeGo.
I remember years ago the difficulty of getting corporations to consider Linux and even now the difficulty of getting home users to consider using Linux. Given what I’ve seen of the MeeGo community so far, I have doubts about MeeGo ever getting beyond being a toy for hobbyists. This is unfortunate, because MeeGo has the potential to become a great platform and a chance to illustrate the advantages of open source development.
Can Intel, Nokia and LG step in and help developers focus on the bigger picture? I don’t know. However, until something like that happens, I’ll keep playing with my N900 as a great cell phone for hobbyists. I’ll kick around Moblin and eventually MeeGo on a netbook or two, but I’m unlikely to spend a lot of time taking what I’ve written and packaging them for wider distribution and I’m probably even less likely to recommend Maemo, Moblin, or Meego to anyone except my geekiest friends.
February 24th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/24/2010 - 07:06
February 23rd
An Act Concerning Certificates of Origin for Dogs Sold by Pet Shop Licensees
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 16:05Yesterday, there was a public hearing about bills before the Environment Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly. Unfortunately, I could not attend this hearing since I was at the Government Administration and Elections Committee Public Hearing about the Citizens’ Election Program.
However, there was one bill that I’m very interested in hearing more about. It is An Act Concerning Certificates of Origin for Dogs Sold by Pet Shop Licensees. The goal of this bill is “To reduce costs associated with the administration of certificates of origin.”
Current Connecticut Law states:
Any dog sold or offered for sale by a pet shop licensee in this state shall be accompanied by a certificate of origin identifying the name and address of the person, firm or corporation that bred such dog and of any person, firm or corporation that sold such dog to such pet shop licensee. Such information contained in the certificate of origin shall be posted in a conspicuous manner not more than ten feet from the location where such dog is displayed for sale. A copy of such certificate shall be provided to the purchaser of such dog at the time of sale.
The proposed bill would replace the current requirement that the certificate of origin “shall be filed by such licensee with the Department of Agriculture not later than two days after such sale” with a requirement that
For a period of not less than one year after the date of issuance, each pet shop licensee shall retain an electronic or paper copy of any certificate of origin issued by such pet shop licensee to a purchaser. During such one-year period, each pet shop licensee shall make such electronic or paper copy available for inspection by the Department of Agriculture upon request by the department.
While I appreciate the desire to reduce administrative costs, especially during these times of major budget shortfalls, I question the wisdom of this proposed change. Currently, there are hundreds of dogs in municipal shelters across Connecticut. Just today, six more dogs were added to the City of Hartford Animal Shelter List. Any dogs unclaimed at the Hartford Shelter after ten days gets put to sleep. Is the cost of maintaining records at the Department of Agriculture greater than the cost of keeping dogs at shelters and eventually putting them to sleep? What are the real costs?
To gather this information, I called the CT Department of Agriculture on February 12th. The answering machine informed me no one was in the office. So, I figured it might be more effective to send an email to the address listed on the Department of Agriculture Website.
In my email, I asked some simple background questions. How many Pet Shop Licensees are there in the State of Connecticut that register certificates of origin with the Department of Agriculture? How many certificates of origin are filed each year with the department? How much does it cost for pet shops to file such certificates? How much does it cost the state to process such certificates?
This information would be helpful in understanding the costs and whether the bill is a good idea. What is more interesting to me is information about the number of dogs that are listed, what breeds they are, what states they have been brought in from, and other related information. Looking at this information could be helpful in finding ways to address the problems of too many dogs in our municipal shelters.
Unfortunately, no one at the Department of Agriculture ever responded to my request. Six days later, I sent it again, noting this was a second request and that it related to bill 5118. As of today, I have still received no response to my email.
Today, I called the Department of Agriculture again and explained what I was looking for. I was bounced from one person to another and no one knew who receives the emails sent to the Department of Agriculture. The last human at the Department of Agriculture I managed to speak to said that she could not speak to me, but that I should speak with Ray Connors who works for the Animal Control Division. I have left a voicemail for Mr. Connors and am awaiting a reply.
While I initially thought that there would be value to the Department of Agriculture tracking the number of dogs sold in the State of Connecticut and where the dogs came from, I now have doubts whether or not the agency, which seems unable to even answer emails is capable of the task.
Perhaps working with the Department of Agriculture to help them with basic computer skills, followed by moving to an electronic filing system of certificates of origin for dogs sold in Connecticut would be the best course of action.
