The Transparency Law

Imagine it's a Monday of May 3th. You are driving in Quito a suddenly you are stopped by a policeman. The policeman asks for your license and car registration.

You do not understand why the police stopped your. The policeman gives you a ticket for $80 – and informs you that your car will be taken away for a day. You don't understand anything, so you ask the police officer “why am I getting this ticket?” The officer tells you that it's because of the new Pico y Placa law – this is the one day of the week you aren't allowed to drive your vehicle during rush hour. It's part of the city's efforts to reduce traffic.

This isn't a true story, but it could be. Do you know all the rules about the Pico y Placa law that starts on May 3? If you don't, it's time you learned more about your city government. By the end of my speech today you'll know how to that using the Transparency Law -- and why you should.

Before the law was created, when people in Quito needed to get information about the rules or costs for city services – such as?. They had to wait in long lines just to ask about requirements and costs. This was a waste of time. Then, people would have to return again a different day once they had all their necessary documents, wait in line again, and often be turned away because they were still missing something that was required.

But there is someone walking by the long lines. Who is he? He is a “tramitador”, someone who preyed on people's desperation and ignorance. Many people would pay the tramitador a lot of money to help them meet the requirements even though the service was often free or very inexpensive. This was a huge problem

People couldn't easily get access to information about how to comply with rules, or costs, and this led directly to corruption and abuse.

This is exactly the kind of problem the transparency law was created to solve.

The full name "Transparency Law” is “Law Organic of Transparency and Access to Public Information ". This Law was published in May 18, 2004. In his article seven said: those institutions must publish on their web sites, the following minimum information about the requirements and costs of services, projects, plans and programs and others.

That information should be published organized by subject, items, sequential or chronological order, etc, without grouping or generalize, so that citizens can be informed correctly and without confusion.

The "Transparency Law" is a tool that citizens can use to get all the information we mentioned. The Municipality of Quito has a department called Quito Honesto whose purpose is to implement of article seven of the Law on Transparency in the departments of the Municipality of Quito.

So now, instead of waiting in long lines or paying someone a lot of money, all citizens can find and download from the internet information concerning the requirements and costs of services, projects, plans and Programs of the Municipality of Quito. You only need Internet and get all of the information you need in advance.

When Quito Honesto websites evaluated according with article seven of the Transparency Law, the department obtained the qualifications: