Perhaps Mayor Tom Henry is getting better with experience. Perhaps it’s the addition of two key officials new to the city.

Or maybe, it’s just good timing.

Whatever the reasons, recent events in city government are welcome moves that serve residents well.

Faced with a City Council uprising over consultant contracts, the old Henry might have dug in his heels. Instead, he made the common-sense move of asking key council critics to sit down at the table with administration officials to address the specifics regarding council oversight of the contracts.

Members of the new committee had their first meeting last week and got off to a good start. They have yet to work out the particulars, but both sides seem to be moving toward some kind of agreement that will include giving the council more oversight over significant and controversial contracts without a micromanaging scrutiny of every single agreement.

With some of the same council members rightly insisting on more transparency regarding other city finances, Henry’s administration has again responded with positive action. Key administration officials are moving to put more financial information on the city’s Web site. Their actions may take longer than it took county government to post similar information, but they are moving in the right direction.

While administration officials have spent too much of the past 2½ years rationalizing why information couldn’t be public, new Deputy Mayor Beth Malloy has seemed to adopt a much better position: the more information that is public, the better. She and the new mayoral spokesman, Joe Fox, appear to be sincerely moving to make the administration more open.

Malloy and Fox are familiar with the city – Malloy did consulting work for the administration and Fox managed Henry’s mayoral campaign – but are new residents.

These advancements come about the same time that a previous Henry move that predates the new officials’ arrival appeared to pay off big time. After flubbing a previous attempt to award a new garbage contract, Henry and his administration brought in citizens and civic leaders to help and made the entire process refreshingly open. Now, it appears the fee for city garbage collection could actually go down next year, for the first time ever.

This page has been quick to criticize Henry when his administration was less than forthcoming or made miscues. Now, he deserves praise for the path he appears to be taking.