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The
final touches on the state budget have yet to be
applied. But even now, before the last bit of
lipstick has been applied, there are indications
that even in what is being trumpeted as a
“conservative” budget there lurks the scent of
porky goodness. Richmond Times-Dispatch
reporter Jeff Schapiro outlined a
few of them over the weekend. And what tasty
morsels they are:
Thanks
to the heads of the House and Senate money
committees, independent Lacey Putney and Democrat
Chuck Colgan, Aging Together and Bedford Hospice
House each get $200,000. The cash torrent also
applies to flood control in their districts; in
particular, funds for dam repairs in Bedford and
Manassas.
Del.
Johnny Joannou, a Democrat, delivered $200,000 for
Portsmouth's Holiday House, a facility for the
mentally retarded.
Del.
Phil Hamilton, a Republican, tagged $500,000 for
the Patient Advocate Foundation. He is a member of
the foundation's board of directors.
Good
to the last bite… and even tastier if you happen
to be a budget negotiator.
That
even a “lean” budget has room for baubles like
this comes as no surprise. As a species,
legislators are hard-wired to seek out and gobble
up whatever extra bits of lucre they can. That’s
petty politics. But what about the bits we can’t
see… the payments and contracts that state and
local governments enter into every day, sometimes
with official imprint, sometimes with just a wink
and a nod? How many odd bits of pork, fluff, waste
or outright fraud lurk in those mountains of check
stubs and bank statements?
In
2005, Sen. Walter Stosch got legislation passed
that charged the Auditor of Public accounts to
create a way for average folks to get a better
handle on some of these matters. The result, Commonwealth
Data Point, provides a healthy amount of
information on how state departments and agencies,
as well as local governments, spend your money.
For
example, you can look at “Small Purchase Charge
Card by Agency and College.” Now, charge card
purchases – big and small – are always
interesting things to view. Who ordered the adult
movies at the Leesburg Holiday Inn? Prurient minds
want to know.
Let’s
take transportation as a guinea pig. I looked
to see what state employees had been buying with
the state’s plastic. In the second quarter of FY
2008, “Transportations” ran up nearly $3.9
million in charges. That’s a lot of movie
rentals. Or is it?
Moving
on to the next screen, I found that this number
was an aggregate for all of the state’s
transportation departments and agencies. Okay, so
maybe the “Adventures of O” weren’t so
popular after all. But looking at the figures, the
Virginia Department of Transportation had charged
the most by far – over $11 million.
Now
we were getting somewhere. I clicked on that
number and find… a series of months going back
to the beginning of this Fiscal Year. Hmm. Seems
charge activity went up every month, cresting in
December ($2.3 million). Ah hah! Those fiends were
saving up the dough to buy Christmas gifts for all
their cronies… I just knew it!
So
I clicked on December and found… lots and lots
of charges at tire centers, hardware stores,
newspapers, various companies that do… something
or other, over $500 at a Bass Pro Shop… In other
words, there’s a lot of information here, but
with no context. Why all the money spent at tire
centers? I can infer that it’s because VDOT,
like anyone else, needs to put new tires on its
trucks. Body shops? Mishaps occur. Twelve bucks at
Lowe’s? You can never have enough duct tape.
For
anyone who wants to know how their money was spent
– or in this example, charged – it can most
likely be found. But without knowing the whys,
hows and what-fors, these expenditures are so much
bureaucratic camouflage: They tell us much,
without telling us anything at all.
To
correct this, a sunlight bill was introduced
during the session that would have put all this
out-go into so much-needed perspective. One
measure, introduced by Sen. Ken Cuccinelli,
R-Fairfax, would have required the creation of a
searchable database that would, among other
things, allow people to discover who got money
from which state agency, how much they got, and
perhaps most importantly, “a descriptive purpose
for the funding or expenditure.”
Why
did VDOT charge over $500 at the Bass Pro Shop?
Was it for bait and tackle? A lifetime fishing
license? A canoe? Under the current set-up, it
will remain a mystery. But under the approach
Cuccinelli and others proposed, we might get a
clear picture of what the money bought, who did
the buying and why they did it.
This
is one of the reasons why this bill went nowhere
during the session. Oh, it got some unfriendly
notice from at least one Senate budgeteer. And
while the bill’s failure was disappointing, it
wasn’t totally unexpected. Opaque spending
decisions suit the interests of the political
class just fine. It allows things like the handing
out of patronage jobs to former Sen. Russ Potts to
slide by without a lot of notice and even fewer
questions. It also opens the door to other
mischief. Scroll down in the comments, and there's
this gem:
One
of the "fine print deficiencies" of the
Commonwealth Data Point site is that agencies are
increasingly using Mastercard for purchases and
the amount of the expense is recorded, but not the
nature of the expenditure, or, in the case of
personal type expenses like conferences, the state
employee charging the item.
The
tales those cards could tell....
Like
the high times you can have at the Bass Pro Shop,
it seems.
Virginia’s
reluctance to bite on full budget transparency
probably isn’t out of character. New-fangled
ideas tend to take a while before they gain any
real hold on the minds of the Commonwealth’s
political class – especially if those ideas even
remotely threaten the status quo.
But
that’s the charitable way to express the foot
dragging. The other comes in the form of an
anecdote:
Last
week, I was on a conference call with some of the
people pushing for budget transparency laws across
the country. Grover Norquist was on the line…
and so was Ralph Nader. Each has his own reasons
for championing the idea, but one of the most
interesting remarks I heard came from an Oklahoma
legislator. He said that right as the governor was
getting ready to sign his state’s transparency
law, the chamber of commerce came out against it.
The reason? They didn’t want the average guy on
the street to see what special favors the chamber
might be getting from the government. They
didn’t have anything to fear, really, because
the resulting website
isn’t any more detailed than Commonwealth Data
Point.
Even
a little sunlight makes some people very nervous.
Virginia has gone farther than most in making its
books open to scrutiny. But it still has a long
way to go before its ledger can be said to be
truly transparent.
--
March 24, 2008
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