Alan Henderson's transparency plan
Access Over Authority
Government You Can Audit
City Hall shouldn't grade its own homework. This plan makes Tampa's government public by default, measured by an independent scorekeeper, and open in formats anyone can actually use.
The audit trail
Open by default, measured in public
Four commitments run through the whole pillar: information is public unless the city proves otherwise; one front door shows you where your request stands; an independent office publishes the grades; and the budget funds outcomes residents can verify — not line items nobody questions.
Part01Public by Default
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The presumption flips on Day One: publish proactively, justify every withholding, and bring open-government rules into the digital age — texts, apps, and threads included.
Part02One Front Door
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A permit, a pothole, a billing question: one place to ask, one case to track, no starting over. CitySync pilots a few services well before it scales — with published evidence at every stage.
Part03An Independent Scorekeeper
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Measurement begins in the first month — interim governance, evidence rules, a public calendar — and the grades publish against honest baselines. What works gets funded; what doesn't gets fixed or cut, in the open.
Questions, answered straight
What does "Transparency by Default" actually mean?
Executive Order 005 flips the presumption: city information is public by default, and the burden is on the city to justify withholding anything. Departments publish proactively — meeting materials, data, decisions — and records response times are tracked and published, so you don't have to fight for what's already yours.
What is CitySync?
One front door for every city service: request, track your case stage by stage, and see where things stand — instead of a separate maze per department. It starts with scoped pilots and a public beta, and scales only after the pilots prove reliable.
Who grades City Hall?
Not City Hall. The independent Office of Civic Insights publishes department scorecards and a citywide Trust Index, with methodology you can inspect — and only after honest baselines exist, so improvements are real and backsliding shows.
Can I see where the money goes?
Yes. Outcome-based budgeting makes departments name the outcomes they're buying and report against them, and the Transparency Ledger publishes city data in open, machine-readable formats with a public API — most-requested datasets first.
Make this real
Fund the fight for government you can audit.
Help organize Tampa around a plan residents can inspect.