Fiscal Rangers

More Lake County, FL Cities and government agencies need to provide Live or uploaded meeting videos!

Local cities and government agencies in Florida, including Lake County, FL, are reducing public transparency by removing most published documents, even for upcoming meeting agendas and staff packets, or annual financial reports or budgets. They are doing it to avoid nuisance lawsuits by roving bands of attorneys suing them for not spending thousands of taxpayer dollars to comply with Federal ADA laws related to "accessibility" for sight and hearing limited users. Read more →

Federal & Florida ADA Compliance laws are wrecking local government transparency and incurring huge costs

Tavares, FL March 11, 2019 Federal and Florida regulations on compliance with the American Disabilities Act (ADA) are causing excess costs and reduced public transparency over local government meeting videos, agendas, budgets and even annual financial reports (CAFR's). Essentially, some scummy lawyers found that ADA requirements can be interpreted to require that any local government has to provide online information in a format that can be read by ADA software tools used by the disabled, such as vision limited or hearing limited. Apparently, the tools use screen "scanning" to find text or picture captions that can then be converted to audio so the disabled can "read" or "hear" the online information. We wrote an earlier story about this in January 2019 HERE, after the Orlando Sentinel published a story about it. It contains more about the scummy lawsuits, so I did not repeat it here. The Jan. 6, 2019 Orlando Sentinel story is here. And very few local governments have the funds to revamp their websites and file systems to comply with the lawsuit demands. Now, a city like Orlando could afford to get the software and modify all their files so they can be read by the ADA tools,... Read more →