Previous Topic of the Day
From Ohio Sunshine
Today's topic, Sept. 23, 2008:
The first in our occasional roundup of state think-tank transparency efforts
This week's review of our transparency peers features Florida's James Madison Institute, Kentucky's Bluegrass Institute, Michigan's Mackinac Center, Nevada's Policy Research Institute, and Utah's Sutherland Institute.
At James Madison, Reason's Lou Valladsen challenges Madison Scholar Sandra Fabry's description of items necessary to transparency and gives a former higher-ed bureacrat's view that "'a single, searchable online database for state expenditures' . . . is a whole lot harder than it sounds." Valladsen calls for smaller, discrete efforts that allow for emerging best practices--and philosophical buy-in from governments, which should give transparency organizations such as James Madison a seat at the stakeholder's table.
At the Sutherland Institute, Derek Monson writes that, while Utah state government has established a Transparency Advisory Board, so far there hasn't been a good deal of citizen participation. He asks, "Do we really want open, transparent government?" and says citizens should "Be a Man" and step up, as inspired by founding father Thomas Paine: "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
At the Bluegrass Institute, Director Jim Waters gets right to the heart of the beast, telling Kentucky's Western Public Radio that the legislative budget process is ridiculously obscure: “The discussion isn’t out in the open about how discretionary spending in particular is going to occur. It can also allow politicians to trade projects back and forth, and not have to be accountable for that to the public. I don’t think that’s healthy.”
The Nevada Policy Research Institute launched its transparency web site, where it posts data from state and local governments and works to prompt them to do it themselves. An ever-growing list includes contracts and awards, payroll, lobbying disclosures, financial reports and income and expense statements.
The venerable Mackinac Center (to you folks outside the heartland, that's pronounced "Mackin-aw" not "Mackin-ack") has an ever-growing list of resources, and notes a distinction between governments and the people who pay for governments: "Unlike private groups and individuals, who have privacy rights, governments have an obligation to disclose their actions and expenditures, since the authority to tax and compel obedience must be premised on the government’s remaining a servant of the people, and therefore accountable to them."
Not quite a year ago, a state representative performed a public service by asking one of those questions that you'd think would be obvious but in fact no one knows.
Can you answer the question, how many government entities are there in Ohio? Of course no normal person can; we'd each immediately think that the answer is knowable and known by someone, just not us: "Let's see, there are 88 counties . . .".
As it turns out, though, it's the kind of question no one can answer. State Rep. Larry Wolpert, a member of the General Assembly, which should be the supreme governing branch of any representative democracy, asked the Legislative Service Commission, the legislature's in-house expert researcher on all questions that might be faced, what the count was. Their answer was, they couldn't do it. There was no authoritative source.
To be fair, it's kind of like asking, "How many felonies are there?" No one knows that, either.
Both things are troubling. We, the public, ought to know how many ways there are to jail someone. We ought to know how many governments collect taxes from us, or could.
The LSC memo is here. OhioSunshine will address the question, How many governments are there in Ohio?
Check out this story: Officials say that, without examining their files on a project-by-project basis,they can't say which companies met or didn't meet signed contractual commitments for job creation, retention or training in exchange for the help from taxpayers. That's good reporting.
Travel intervenes this week, slowing us down a bit in our efforts to populate the site. In the meantime, does anyone in OhioSunshine wikiland have ideas about what basic data should be going up next? Employment contracts of government muckety-mucks? Local government documents? School districts? Let us know.
This week, the Center for Transparent and Accountable Government will begin in earnest to distribute transparency pledges to all candidates for elective office in Ohio. While CTAG expects to conduct a comprehensive effort, we also invite all interested Ohioans to participate and lead. Has your school board or council and candidates addressed the pledge for transparency? Do you believe they should?
Thank you to the person who added YourRightToKnow blog to the blog roll. There is a lot more good work out there, too.
Welcome to SaveHilliardSchools.org, which recently joined the OhioSunshine.org blog roll, along with dontturnawayoh.blogspot.com which recently joined Local Unofficial Web Sites promoting transparency.
Some recent material: Links to all 206 performance audits conducted by the state Auditor since 1996: Performance Audits - Ohio. Some possible discussion topics for the editing community
I have a couple of basic questions that I think worth posing. The more specific of the two is discussing what the various "entity" pages should look like in the light of the wiki mission, while the more general of the two is the question of what constitutes transparency and availability of data. (It'll be quite interesting to see which of the two questions is harder to answer.)
As to the entity pages, what should, for example, a "Toledo" page or a "Department of Commerce" page look like in this wiki? Presumably it doesn't make a lot of sense doing what Wikipedia does, discussing geography and economy, etc. But then what should the pages look like? Public records policies? Contact information? Checklists based upon transparency domains? (And of course there's the wiki sensibility, as the community develops that answers those questions, balancing creativity, conformity, stability and openness.) The other question is, for me at least, mostly about navigation. Yes, there is the collection and/or generation of data, but once that is done, how in the world does access to the information get organized? I propose this page, the Talk:Main Navigation Page as a place of discussion for anyone interested.
