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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

The most important news is in the subtitle -

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.

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It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden.

Secret deals with corporations is corruption.

Secrecy needs a time limit.

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.

They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.

Then you'll need to tell them democracy overrules commercial reasons.

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.

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.

The submitting of corporate largess to multiple government entities for bids is (imo) a de facto hostile act, and should be treated as such.

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.

If McD builds outside of Smallville, they don't get any of the services that Smallville taxes subsidize. Smallville taxes serve Smallvillians, not corporate villains.

True. But McD may decide that the services in developer-friendly Small Township are just as good, for their use case. And Smallville residents may be content to drive another 500 yards down Smallville-Littleton Rd., to spend their money at the new McD out in Smallville Twp.

In public policy, everything is a tradeoff.

In which case, one might expect Borger Kong to build in developer-unfriendly Smallville, because they will capture the people driving outside of Smallville. All your arguments are easily countered by basic supply and demand hyoptheticals.

There is no reason that McDonald's shouldn't own the risk of developing a McDonalds, and instead make secret deals with local governments to offset some of that risk. Thats a cost that should be borne by the business.

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.

I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?

You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.

Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html

I can't believe this is still around. I remember printing this out to show my science teacher decades ago.

Of course it's still around. They're still putting this crap in schools!

Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around

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