Journalists of Kremenchuk managed to make authorities more transparent

The website of Kremenchuk city council and its executive committee will now have a section of data open for public. This was the result of the response by Kremenchuk mayor Vitaliy Maltskyi to the journalists’ petition “On mending by Kremenchuk city council and its executive committee of the violations of the Law “On access to public information”, Kremenchutskyi Telegraf reports.

“The work of the executive committee of Kremenchuk city council and its structural subdivisions is focused on securing legality, publicity, and transparency in the process of their activities”, the city mayor’s reply declares. The city council also registered its page at the portal data.gov.ua (which has not been previously done).

The petition was filed by the journalist of “Kremenchutskyi Telegraf” Tetiana Donchenko (Volynska), and composed by journalists, who initiated the project “Open access”. In their petition, the journalists demanded that the city council publish drafts of its resolutions in 20 days before adoption, as the Law "On access to public information" provides for (which the mayor thinks is still an unrealistic thing to accomplish). Also, they demanded that the city council publish all open data at the Unified State Web Portal of open data data.gov.ua and at the online portal of Kremenchuk city council as per Decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No.835 as of October 21, 2015 “On approval of Procedure on sets of data to be published in form of open data.” They also requested that financial information, information on lease of city property, on unoccupied land plots, debts and reports of municipal enterprises, and city programs financed by the city was also made public.