The Valley Report Needs Your Input

This site, along with Louisville History & Issues, needs input from our readers on crafting a letter to be sent to the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. We are looking for your ideas and suggestions to help alert the public to the importance of opening the books ahead of Mayor Abramson's announcement Wednesday. The mayor is expected to lay out more cuts and possibly layoffs.

We could do this alone, but we would rather have help from the citizens, making it more broad-based and accepted as being more than just a concern of the "blogging community". It is with your help that we can expect to make the case for transparency in our government.

You may either leave a comment to this post or email one of us directly.

Thank you, and remember the number one rule: "Politics is the art of controlling your environment".

UPDATE 12/08/2008 10:00pm: Thanks to Steve @ LouHI, we have a good draft going.

While Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson is busy slashing salaries, enacting furloughs, cutting programs and ignoring calls from citizens for transparency in city finances, local bloggers are taking the word to the streets with a simple message: Open the Books. People from all walks of life, from all neighborhoods, political stances and economic backgrounds are making plain their demands to us and, as citizen journalists, it is our responsibility to deliver this message. The citizens of Louisville want city government to make public the financial records that prove Louisville to be in such dire economic straits. The citizens demand that the Mayor and the council make transparent all records of revenue and expenditures so that we may assist in helping to determine what appropriate budgetary changes to make. Accordingly, the citizens also demand that local government freeze all decisions on personnel and service cuts for thirty (30) days, so that we may make sure our examinations of these records as well as the forthcoming annual report on city finances are thorough.

We learned the hard way in these last eight years what to expect when a Mayor, Governor, Legislator or President says, “There is no time…we must act.” We are committed to not let this happen again. We need more than the opinion of a mayor with a history of exercising carte blanche accounting in a highly opaque manner. For the sake of our beloved hometown Metro Louisville and its citizens, we demand action NOW. OPEN THE BOOKS.

After all, it's OUR MONEY. And this mayor was elected to SERVE US.