Public must demand government openness
Public must demand government openness
A big decision is about to be made that will have an impact on every taxpayer. In the next few days, six people will decide whether local governments will start operating in the open or continue to hide their spending from the public.
That is not an exaggeration. Real government transparency will be decided in the budget conference committee. Open government will come down to whether three members of the Senate and three members of the House want to grant citizens better access to their counties' spending habits.
Provided
Ashley Landess
The process behind transparency reveals how dangerously secretive our government has become and how inaccessible it is to the public.
This year, legislation was introduced in the House and the Senate to require governments to put their check registers online. The bills did not make it to the floor, largely because lobbyists and bureaucrats fought behind the scenes.
Their arguments are as predictable as they are false. they actually claim transparency is too expensive to implement. They are wrong. We know that because after Gov. Mark Sanford issued an executive order to create online transparency for state agencies, Comptroller Gen. Richard Eckstrom moved quickly to comply. In March, his office began posting department expenditures online and moving toward making those transactions even more detailed.
The technology exists to enable the counties to put their expenditures online. It is neither expensive nor burdensome and it is already being done, not just in South Carolina but in small school districts in Texas and statewide in Alaska. Most banks already offer the technology to their customers, and because the Freedom of Information Act makes spending information public, it should be easier to provide the information by posting it online.
So how did state analysts manage to conclude that simply posting a check register — something many banks do for free — would cost millions of dollars? It is virtually impossible to tell how the numbers were computed, but Mr. Eckstrom made it very clear that he could provide the service for free.
The truth is that most elected officials do not want to be held accountable, and they fight any measure that forces them to be, usually through lobbyists who are paid with public dollars.
While the full transparency bills did not get out of committee, the Senate did pass Sen. Kevin Bryant's budget proviso, mandating that counties put their registers online in an accessible format. That version should have passed the House but did not. Instead, the House passed a weak proviso that only required Mr. Eckstrom to make the service available. It did not mandate that counties participate at all. What is worse, some House members support transparency and would have fought such a weak law, but they were not included in the process of drafting the amendment. That was done by a select few lawmakers behind closed doors.
Legislators draft laws in secret and then pass them without publicly recording their votes. They give lip service to transparency but will not vote to open up the books on how your money is being spent. They also refuse to mandate roll-call voting even though most states in the Southeast do. In fact, Rep. Nikki Haley introduced a bill this year that would have required roll-call voting on bills with a fiscal impact, but it was not even debated.
Citizens should hope that the three Senate conferees will defend their transparency proviso rather than support the meaningless version passed in the House. More than likely, legislators will keep pretending to support reform publicly without ever defining what that means, and then privately oppose it or simply let it die without a fight.
South Carolinians must insist on a more open government. They should not assume their legislators are voting the way they promised to. The public has an absolute right to know how lawmakers vote and how they spend public money. They will never be guaranteed that information until they demand it.
Ashley Landess is president of the South Carolina Policy Council, a non-profit public policy research organization in Columbia.
http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/may/14/public_must_demand_government_openness40725/?print
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