It’s been almost two years since the D.C. Open Meetings Act took effect, instituting new requirements that all city bodies and agencies had to follow to ensure that the public had as much access to their work as possible. But how well are those agencies doing in complying with the law?

Not very, according to an audit of 27 public bodies conducted by the D.C. Open Government Coalition and released yesterday during a summit on transparency in government. The coalition found that only one of the bodies it looked at—the Historic Preservation Review Board—complied fully with the provisions of the law mandating notice for meetings, advance agendas, and posted minutes and other records of the meetings.

Nine other bodies—including the D.C. Taxicab Commission, the Zoning Commission, Public Charter School Board, and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board—mostly complied but failed to provide certain types of information, while 10 public bodies ranked at the bottom of the list, posting no information whatsoever on their websites. The most notable of those were the State Board of Education and Contract Appeals Board.

During a discussion of the coalition’s findings, Robert Spagnoletti, a former D.C. attorney general who now chairs the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability, offered some reason for hope—he said that he was within a month of selecting a director of the D.C. Open Government Office, which was created under the provisions of the 2010 law but has remained only on paper since. The office will not only be in charge of enforcing the law, but also training D.C. agencies, bodies and employees on how to better comply with it.

Spagnoletti also said that the new ethics office created under a 2011 rewrite of the city’s ethics laws has been kept busy since it was created last year, fielding between four to six calls a day from D.C. government employees seeking advisory opinions on ethics-related issues. (One that comes up often is whether they can accept outside employment; sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t.) The board recently drew the ire of Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), after it found that he had violated the city’s ethics code by in appropriately involving himself in a Metro land deal.

Earlier in the evening, V. David Zvenyach, the D.C. Council’s General Counsel, said that legislators are now told not to use private email accounts for public business, and if they do, to copy the messages to their government email accounts. Last year the coalition sued the council over the use of private email accounts, saying that some councilmembers were using them to skirt Freedom of Information Act requests from the press and public. Last year Mayor Vince Gray ordered that all D.C. employees refrain from using private email accounts to conduct city business.