Texas Comptroller Susan Combs, an advocate for local and state government transparency, was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal recently. Link to the video here. Combs has set up an official web site TexasItsyourMoney.com that is an authentic outreach to Texans to allow them easy access to important local and state taxation and spending matters.
The taxing authority of local entities is extensive and their spending authorizations deserve scrutiny. An argument can well be made that people know less about their local government and its operations than the U.S. Congress. Unfortunately that is not saying much for what we know about Congress!
Every county, municipality, school district in Iowa should have a consistent easy to navigate web site for tax, spend, policy and regulatory matters covering all enactments and proposed enactments and kept current. Existing Iowa county web sites are insufficient windows for real sunlight, typically cumbersome to operate, and are not kept current to the degree possible or useful.
Attractive easy to navigate and read templates, paid for by sharing costs among entities, should be developed to provide citizens information in a uniform and familiar manner. Meetings should be pod cast in real time. The technology exists and is not expensive, certainly in the scheme of things such sunlight and scrutiny will save taxpayers boatloads of money even for the best administered entities.
Each site should contain archives, governing documents, provide citations of authorities with links. As a matter of course auditors or agencies should provide and post explanatory charts and a glossary of terms for proposed and enacted budgets. No arcane language. Minutes of meetings should be linked to archived pod casts. Voting records should be displayed. A variety of digital research tools should be incorporated. Bids should be electronically filed or at least digitally scanned and posted.
Referring to fellow Scott County Republican Central Committee members and last week’s CC meeting, member Todd McGreevy remarked:
We cannot get more than 3 or 4 to attend a county board of supervisors meeting where they bond for millions of dollars of equipment on no bid contracts, guarantee public sector unions 2% raises, create whole new taxing authorities with no caps, cede authority to the UN via Agenda 21, and pass an $80M budget without reading it…. how about the group start monitoring the 4 of 5 Republicans on the board of supervisors rather than each other’s facebook postings?!
Indeed. R Mall
