Gov. Mike Braun has appointed Brittney Long, a former magistrate with the Bartholomew Circuit Court, as Indiana’s Public Access Counselor. She will start Monday, replacing Jennifer Ruby.
Indiana’s top public access official has issued her first two advisory opinions — and resolved more than 30 other complaints for 2025 so far.
The pilot project is operated by the Indiana Coalition for Open Government. The volunteer-staffed hotline will formally launch Aug. 1 but is already open for calls.
Jennifer Ruby, Indiana’s new public access counselor, said she’s not yet sure how the Legislature’s changes to rules regarding her office would be confining to her work.
There’s much more work to be done to assure transparency throughout the rest of state and local government.
Gov. Mike Braun appointed the business-focused Indianapolis attorney to the role.
He can start by protecting the role of the state’s public access counselor despite the Legislature’s moves to weaken the post.
Two pieces of legislation remain unsigned—one defining and banning antisemitism within the Hoosier public education system and another constraining the state’s public access chief.
The proposed changes largely neuter the public access counselor position and were inserted into an unrelated bill with little warning or public testimony.
The city of Winchester in eastern Indiana has fewer than 5,000 residents but one glaring problem in the eyes of local elected officials: people purposefully disrupting government meetings and deliberately disregarding decorum.
By utilizing some strategic forethought and planning, public agencies can help protect board members from harsh public scrutiny while simultaneously adhering to the important tenets of public transparency.
The Indianapolis Public Schools board violated the state’s public meetings law when it approved a lawsuit against the state last week, a charter group has alleged.
The Indiana Supreme Court has amended the Rules on Access to Court Records to exclude from public access, if court ordered, an entire case that the clerk of court has opened under the wrong case type.
Fort Wayne officials violated Indiana’s public records laws by not releasing police body camera footage and other records related to the drunken driving arrest of the city’s mayor, the state’s public access counselor says.
I have observed Indiana University’s Board of Trustees since I was a student journalist in the 1980s. The trustees have always done as much of their business as possible in secret and outside public view.
Near the end of this past summer, county clerks across Indiana became inundated with demands from individual voters that officials provide copies of their oaths and bonds and release voting data from the 2020 general election.
Even if the Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County follows the request by community groups and private citizens to withdraw its case from the U.S. Supreme Court, the fight over 42 U.S.C. § 1983 could still appear before the nine justices this term.
A lawsuit has been filed against the members of the Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County Board of Trustees for violating Indiana’s Open Door Law in appealing a nursing home dispute to the U.S. Supreme Court.
As the Health and Hospital Corp. of Marion County prepares for oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that has attracted national attention, the organization is now having to defend its decision to seek a ruling from the nine justices.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and political pundit Abdul-Hakim Shabazz have ended their public battle that began at a press conference about robocalls with a one-page motion to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit and pay their own legal fees.