One Man's Trash

Norman Leahy

So Much for Transparency

Throwing a bunch of budget numbers onto a website does little to improve local government transparency. The adage "Garbage In, Garbage Out" applies in spades.

Henrico has the reputation of being one of Virginia’s best managed counties. Considering the competition, that might not be the highest praise. But the strength of that reputation lies chiefly in the county’s ability to run a relatively tight fiscal ship. But how sound is it? And would it be possible for an average county taxpayer to discover where, on what and why their money is being spent?

The answer is sort of. As local governments go, Henrico is like its cousins statewide: Expenditures can be determined, in very broad and very outdated categories, via Commonwealth Datapoint. But don’t count on even that general information to be correct. Let’s look at some numbers.

The most recent Henrico information is, as it is for all localities, for fiscal year 2006. Considering we’re halfway through 2008, this information isn’t exactly helpful. But it can still be illustrative, right?

Well, in an impressionist sort of way, perhaps. Looking at the big picture, Henrico shows FY 2006 revenues in excess of $800 million (plus, there’s a neat pie chart showing the sources of that money… hmmm…. lots of federal funds, and plenty of state dough, too). But those numbers don’t square with the county’s own numbers from its website, which show revenues in excess of a billion dollars for FY 2006-2007.

And there’s another problem… Commonwealth Datapoint says the revenues are for FY 2006. The county is reporting FY 2006-2007.Are they the same time period or not?  Maybe. But it’s not clear. Plus, the county’s site shows a number of transfers to and from an array of funds, projects and sundry interdepartmental billings that reduce the total revenue figure to just over $900 million, none of which is available on Commonwealth Datapoint.

Just a toe in the budgetary waters and I’m already confused.

Maybe the expenditure side is better.

Nope. Commonwealth Datapoint shows FY 2006 spending at $737 million, the bulk of which went to education. The county site shows that the municipality spent every penny of the $900 million it had left over. Like the Datapoint site, the county site shows the bulk went to education -- though $2 million less than what Datapoint lists.

Discrepancies of that small degree I can understand. When budgets get to a certain level, a million here and there is a rounding error (though don’t tell that to Henrico, which lobbied residents furiously to change their mailing addresses from “Richmond” to “Henrico” in order to capture an additional $5 million of wayward revenue… and which pocket did that money come from, anyway?).

But discrepancies of tens of millions of dollars I can’t understand. A disclaimer on the Commonwealth Datapoint site says this is not unusual:

…we caution the user that both financial numbers and demographic data are not audited information and may require some review or additional research. This is especially true of current information we add during the fiscal year.

Users of Commonwealth Data Point may require additional resources to understand some of the detail on this website; we would recommend that those users contact the source of the information, since they have original data and documents supporting the transactions.

In other words, take what you find on the Datapoint site with a grain of salt. It might be right, it might not. And really, if you’re dead-set on knowing where your cash goes, look it up somewhere else.

So much for one-stop transparency.

But heeding this advice, I attempt to do my own drill-down of the data to see where my property taxes are going (besides up).

One big new item in the budget is a $73 million expenditure for “Healthcare.” But healthcare for whom? And why hasn’t this shown up in years past? To know that, you have to go to yet another source, one that you might easily miss (or miss entirely if the Times-Dispatch decides, once again, to change all the links for its old news stories). In Will Jones’s article, we learn:

The operating budget represents an 8 percent increase over this year's budget, and it includes, for the first time, payments made by employees and retirees to the county's self-insured health-care plan. If those payments -- previously made to a third-party insurer -- were excluded, the budget increase would be 6.1 percent, [County Manager Virgil] Hazelett said.

Mystery solved, sort of. How payments from individuals into a health plan can raise the county’s expenditures remains unclear, unless the county is covering part of the premium (which is might generous of them). But you can’t find out if that’s the case from the article, or from Hazelett’s explanation, or perhaps even the public hearing on the budget.

But there’s another oddity in Jones’s article: The county site projects expenditures of just over a billion dollars for next year. But in his piece, Jones puts the tab, presumably the one mentioned at the board of supervisors meeting, as $1.234 billion. What happened to the extra $200 million? Was it shuffled off into those other funds, or gobbled up by interdepartmental transfers? Who knows? None of it is in the documents.

So much for local transparency. 

Opponents of the wide-ranging transparency bill sponsored by Ken Cuccinelli and Chap Petersen in the last session said that government was already transparent and we didn’t need to be spending a lot of new money on something that wasn’t needed. Leaving aside the new money canard, the idea that Virginia governments are transparent enough simply doesn’t fly. There’s lots of data out there, to be sure. But don’t count on its accuracy. And for that matter, don’t count on your friendly local government to have more and better numbers. Chances are they don’t.

And they tend to like it that way, too, because nothing helps insulate bureaucracies from accountability better than confusion.

-- May 19, 2008