Spoiler alert: Opaque and becoming more so.
A recent City of Sacramento action to handicap the function of the Sacramento Active Transportation Commission (SacATC) was highlighted in a SacBee article (New Sacramento rule kept traffic safety projections out of commission presentation, SacBee 2026-09-29, Madison Smalstig) as well as an email by Isaac Gonzalez of Slow Down Sacramento, who is also chair of SacATC. If you aren’t on the Slow Down Sacramento email list, I strongly encourage you to join.
To summarize, the commission was prevented from showing a slide presentation on the annual report that they are going to present to council, and was prevented from even printing one slide that showed a horrible and accelerating trend in traffic violence fatalities in the city.
Though this action can be seen as an effort to suppress the actions and communication of SacATC, and it is, it is also part of a trend with the City of Sacramento to reduce transparency and to create the maximum distance between city council and the citizens of the city.
The Personnel and Public Employees Committee was created under the regime of disgraced City Manager Howard Chan to screen all communication from boards and commission to city council. Please understand that the entire reason for boards and commissions is to investigate details and make recommendations to the council. Council cannot possibly look into the details of every issue facing the city, so the board and commissions were created to help them with this task. Chan felt this was too much, and worked to prevent and/or corrupt this communication. This pattern has continued, unabated so far as I can tell, under the current administration of City Manager Maraskeshia Smith.
The longer lead times for submitting agendas, staff reports, and presentations are similarly intended to make it more difficult for boards and commissions to communicate with the public. The Brown Act requires agendas three days or more before meetings, and depending on interpretation, staff reports and presentations as well. This is reasonable. But the city is now requiring that everything be approved by administration 19 days before the three days. The purpose of this is to make sure that much of the information from boards and commissions never reaches the public.
The availability of documents on the city website has decreased. As tools for posting documents has made the process easier, requiring almost no staff intervention, the availability has gone done. Unless you know the specific name of a document, the search engine is unlikely to find it.
The city now requires people to generate public records requests (PRAs – Public Records Act) for documents that should logically be available to the public without request, and some of which were formally available but are no longer. PRAs sometimes lead to the city claiming that the information requested does not exist, which is a lie, or if it is eventually supplied, takes a ridiculously long period of time, generally past when the information was needed. Most governments complain about the expense and staff time required to comply with PRAs, but this is largely a self-inflicted problem. If they simply posted the information, they wouldn’t be subject to PRAs.
As a frequent user of GIS (Graphical Information Systems) data, I would expect that more and more data available in that format would be posted on the city Open Data website. However, the city ceased updating some data several years ago, even though internally the data is still being updated. There are datasets that the city uses internally, but have never been made public. The Streets for People Active Transportation Plan mapped planned bicycle and walking facilities, but it took more than a year and repeated requests from the public for it to show up.
So, opaque or transparent? Opaque.
