Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Where oh where did the city codes go? PART 1

A simple question. If you wanted to find out what the city ordinances were, where would you go? After all these are the codes and laws made by our city to regulate the town. Where are they?

A quick trip to the city town website finds no links to them. You also notice that there does not even seem to be a search option on the website to help you find them.

To locate them you would have to go to a section in the University of Tennessee website. "Why didn't I look there to start with?" you might have just said. I know I did. Inside of the UT website is the MTAS (Municipal Technical Advisory Service) section. Inside that is a page with all the other Tennessee cities that MTAS has their ordinances online.

Now it doesn't seem hard to have a link to a town codes. A good example of this is Belmont California. with a population of 26,000, a good bit smaller then Smyrna, you find a simple link to their codes on the left of their main web page. They even have a Google powered search option on their main page. Such search engines are a free service of Google's and worth inserting a small string of HTML codes to improve a web page.

To put the whole issue into a few short words. Unknown laws are bad laws.

Smyrna is a growing town and a need for a freer flow of information is vitally needed. A few simple links, and free search options could greatly improve a towns web page and deliver a much needed service.

PART 2 Tomorrow

No comments: