Comment by hrimfaxi
9 hours ago
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
9 hours ago
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.
Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.
> the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
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They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.
If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our servants are doing with our equipment on our time.
Then you'll need to tell them democracy overrules commercial reasons.
Because municipalities want to be able to collaborate in the early stages of a potential datacenter project, when it's not fully nailed down and may never happen. A world where municipalities aren't allowed to keep secrets is a less transparent world, where Meta dumps a fully formed datacenter project on the local government and nobody has a chance to suggest that residents would prefer it on the other side of the creek.
There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing business.
Smallville is entitled to a no-exceptions policy.
OTOH, if Smallville seems too unfriendly to developers, the latter may decide to build outside the city limits. Which might become a problem over time, by holding down Smallville's commercial tax base. Forcing the voting citizen to make unhappy choices between high taxes on their own homes, and Smallville having too little money to afford nice things that they want.
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