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Requiring elected officials to file financial disclosures is one way the electorate can keep tabs on them. We were surprised to find the City Council’s annual financial disclosures still aren’t posted to the Honolulu Ethics Commission’s . We couldn’t find them on the city’s information-rich data site, , either.

Ethics Commissioner Chuck Totto told us we’d have to pick up hard copies of the disclosures in order to inspect them. Totto immediately ran copies for us, and we were able to get the documents the same day, but what’s stopping the City Council from seeing to it that their disclosures are easily accessible to the public online?

Even Mayor Peter Carlisle — whose has not exactly been dynamic since its launch last month — saw to it that his financial disclosure is uploaded to that site, along with the financial disclosures of his Cabinet.

While we wait to see the City Council follow suit, we can at least read council members’ monthly spending reports. Links to those documents are on the city website, right below members’ contact information.

In fact, that information is so accessible, Civil Beat already wrote a story about it.

Read more at Off The Beat: Buzz in the Civil Beat Newsroom .