Recovery.org Transforms Government Spending Transparency

You may not like President Obama's economic stimulus package, but you should at least like President Obama's use of the Web to account for that stimulus money. Recovery.gov isn't just another government website. According to Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chairman and Inspector General Earl Devaney, the stimulus-tracking website has permanently and positively transformed the concept of government transparency:

...it's transformational. I think that the government is going to do business like this in the future. This is probably the biggest experiment going on right now, and they'll take the good and build on it and we will probably learn a lot of lessons as we go along [Earl Devaney, quoted by Chad Vander Veen, "Earl Devaney, Chairman of the Federal Recovery Board, Talks About Building and Running Recovery.gov," Government Technology, 2010.06.15].

But wasn't there some ruckus last fall about recovery money being spent in non-existent Congressional districts? Yes... and that ruckus wouldn't have happened without the transparency of Recovery.org:

...the downside to transparency is often embarrassment. When we went live [with stimulus spending data] in October, there was a lot of outcry about the data. Some of the data was bad. There are 99 data elements that the recipients [of stimulus funds] had to send in to FederalReporting.gov and get right. One of the big snafus was that turns out not many of the recipients knew what congressional district they live in. So they just put in two numbers, they didn't care if they were the right numbers because the system allowed them to move on to the next question. Well, when we had a database full of incorrect congressional districts, that didn't make Congress very happy. There's a technical fix to that; we tied the ZIP codes to the congressional district, and if the ZIP code entered by the user doesn't match the congressional district, the user is told there is a problem. That corrected that problem in the next reporting period, so that data got a lot better [Devaney in Vander Veen, 2010].

Devaney sees himself and a couple dozen other inspectors general now backed up by thousands and thousands of reporters, bloggers, and regular citizens searching Recovery.gov for information on local projects and eager to print critical news stories or hit the "report fraud" button if they see something questionable. He says the stimulus money has as much potential for waste and abuse as past government spending programs. The difference is that it's a lot easier for us to find out about it, alert the overseeing agencies, and stanch that waste and abuse.

All thanks to a website and citizen participation... and an Administration that understands the value of both.

Hunhoff: Open Government Saves South Dakota Over $10 Million

State House Minority Leader Bernie Hunhoff (D-18/Yankton) takes a moment to send me some thoughts on how open government promotes fiscal responsibility.

Hunhoff speaks here specifically of the huge subsidies South Dakota planned to hand to multi-billion dollar foreign corporation TransCanada to build its Keystone pipelines. Pierre wanted to keep those numbers secret; last year's new open government law brought those surprising numbers out. We're still handing TransCanada a subsidy (our neighbors in North Dakota and Nebraska are not), but Democrats in the Legislature managed to push their pro-corporate Republicans to compromise and cut the subsidy in half, thus keeping more money in our hands to balance our budget.

You can't save money if you don't know how government is spending that money in the first place.

Hmm... I think I know a Democratic candidate for governor who's saying very much the same thing....

OPEN GOVERNMENT SAVED US $10 MILLION-PLUS

By Rep. Bernie Hunhoff

It's always fun to say "I told you so," and when millions are at stake it's really nice. So here goes.

Remember when certain lawmakers begged for a more open and transparent government? We said it could save money because we might find waste and inefficiencies.

Finally, last year we passed a decent "open government" bill. When it took effect, a Pierre reporter named Bob Mercer requested a list of companies benefiting from a fairly obscure economic development program. The news hound had asked for information earlier but he was denied. The new law made it impossible for state officials to refuse.

Some of us were shocked when we saw that the corporate incentive program — which rebates sales and excise taxes to energy projects over $10 million in size — had already paid out $59 million to a long list of companies.

Some of the projects seemed worthy of a tax incentive. They were creating lots of jobs or developing renewable energies such as wind and ethanol. Some projects may not have come to South Dakota without the program. But other subsidies seemed unnecessary. One of the beneficiaries was TransCanada Pipeline, a $40 billion foreign company that had just completed a crude oil pipeline from deep in Canada to the southern states. The pipe was laid across East River last summer and fall.

North Dakota and Nebraska and other states aren't subsidizing the line. Quite the opposite. They intend to fully apply their sales taxes, and then charge their corporate income taxes forever — based on the amount of property the pipeline has in each state.

Quite a debate ensued in Pierre. We soon found that TransCanada would get a $38 million subsidy on a second West River pipeline if we did nothing. And it looked like little would happen because House Republicans refused to budge on the issue. But on our last day Friday, we reached a compromise that should trim the TransCanada subsidy by about half, and will also save tax dollars on other large projects. We then added a "sunset" to the entire program. Hopefully it will resurrected with targeted goals and lots of transparency.

Don't be mad at TransCanada or their lobbyists (though they seemed slightly irritated with some of us by the end of session). TransCanada officials have done nothing wrong, and they provided substantial economic activity here. They will also pay a lot of property taxes. They have every right to stand up for themselves in Pierre. But legislators should put South Dakota's interests first.

We can't balance our budget without aid from Washington. We haven't done so for eight years. And we can't even find $4 million to meet our statutory obligation to local schools. Yet many Republican legislators thought we could afford nearly ten times as much for an international company that will only provide a handful of permanent jobs.

Secrecy is expensive in government. Once the veil was lifted on this tax give-away program, we had a fighting chance to reform it. Hopefully we'll find other savings as South Dakota grows accustomed to government transparency.

Beck's Reporters Love Truth... So Get on These Stories!

Randell Beck, publisher of that Sioux falls paper, celebrates Sunshine Week with a celebration of newspaper reporters:

In an era increasingly shaped by ideological trench warfare - a media-saturated world in which folks are lured to consume prepackaged news mirroring their own narrow worldview - the very best reporters challenge authority, ask the hardest questions, challenge conventional thinking and hold accountable those who presume to speak for all of us - all with a relentless fidelity to the truth, "without fear or favor" [Randell Beck, "The Best Reporters Pursue Truth," that Sioux Falls paper, 2010.03.14].

Like Beck, I am grateful for reporters. The paid media do a lot of investigative work that even the most passioante among us bloggers cannot afford to do on a regular basis. It's their job to be watchdogs over government and industry for the rest of us who are busy working other jobs all week long.

In that spirit, I hope Mr. Beck will dispatch his reporters to find some truth about the following stories that have yet to get much attention from the newspapers:

• Rick Millner's state-supported Veblen East Dairy has been cited for violating DENR regulations. The dairy, now in receivership, appears to follow the same pattern of financial woe and willful environmental disregard that characterize other Millner business ventures. Just what is going on in Veblen, and why has the state offered so much support to this particular mega-CAFO?
• Last October, Senator Thune voted against an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that prohibits private defense contractors from preventing employees from taking cases of workplace sexual assault, battery, and discrimination to court. Thune's hometown media in Sioux Falls have yet to hold the Senator to a serious accounting on that vote. (I welcome examples to the contrary.)
• Beck touts some up-and-coming journalism scholarship winners, saying "we've got some pretty strong future reporters in the pipeline." But they've had darn few reporters on the pipeline—the Keystone pipeline, that is. The biggest construction project in the country plowed through South Dakota last summer, tearing up roads and farm fields. Where were the newspaper reports about the disruption and grief caused to our local farmers?
• Beck shares my thirst for transparency in government. Locally, however, Madison has an economic development corporation, the LAIC, that operates in near complete secrecy. The city and county dump tax dollars into the LAIC, and the public never receives a detailed accounting of how that money is spent. The LAIC keeps a lid on useful information that should be public by charging exorbitant fees for access. Our local newspaper gives the LAIC nothing but the "rainbows and sunshine" one of Beck's scholarship winners derides.

My fellow bloggers and I can likely offer more examples... but we've got to head off to our paying jobs.

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p.s.: Beck makes a big deal about how reporters and editors refuse to align with any philosophy and keep their opinions out of their work. Again, Beck peddles the harmful myth of journalistic objectivity. He himself enunciates a clear (and admirable!) philosophy that motivates the best journalists: challenge authority and conventional thinking, hold the powerful accountable, seek truth... sorry, Randell, that's a philosophy. We do better to wear our philosophies on our sleeves than to pretend we don't have them.

Beck also invokes God twice in this one editorial. That's philosophy, too.

U.S. Military Authorizes Twitter, Facebook, Web 2.0

Be all that you can be... 140 characters at a time!

A commenter here once expressed shock and disgust that KJAM's Matt Hendrickson and I would be using Facebook. What does a grown man need to be Facebook for? the commenter asked oh so ominously.

Well, that commenter can now turn her ire to Uncle Sam: the Pentagon just announced Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of Web 2.0 are cool:

The Pentagon announced on Friday it has authorized the use Twitter, Facebook and other so-called "Web 2.0" sites across the U.S. military, saying the benefits of social media outweighed security concerns.

..."The purpose of the policy is to recognize that we need to take advantage of these Internet-based capabilities. These Web 2.0 tools need to be part of what we use," David Wennergren, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, told Reuters.

"And what we had were inconsistent approaches. Some websites were blocked and some commands were blocking things."

Social media are increasingly important for the U.S. military. Admiral Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the top U.S. military officer, has a Twitter feed with more than 16,000 followers.

U.S. Southern Command offered operational updates via Twitter on relief activities in Haiti [Phil Stewart, "Military Allows Twitter, Other Social Media," Reuters, 2010.02.27].

Even the U.S. military recognizes that openness and interactivity have their advantages.

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Web Bonus! Check out this good article from Reporters without Borders discussing the global conflict between free access to information and government control of the Internet. South Dakota's attempted Blog Control Acts didn't make the story, but stay tuned for next year....

GOP SD Budget Plan: Big on Cuts, Short on Citizen Participation

Well, at least we won't be arguing over cutting public radio (or will we?)....

Our men in Pierre, David Montgomery and Bob Mercer, provide excellent coverage of the Republican plan to balance the state budget. Montgomery is also fast on the draw covering the bad blood bubbling openly between Governor Rounds and his fellow Republicans in the Legislature. Meanwhile, Democrats are hanging back, watching the fun and reminding us that they proposed about two-thirds of GOP's budget ideas last November.

I will agree with Governor Rounds on at least one point:

Said Rounds: “We have been available and have offered every single week to participate and to discuss the budget. We have been told that it was a secret and we have been told that when they were ready they would come visit with us.”

Rounds sharply criticized the Republican budget, saying it was “not the appropriate way to build a budget” and would have a “devastating” impact on the Board of Regents and other programs [David Montgomery, "Gloves Come off for Rounds, Legislators," Pierre Capital Journal: Behind Government Lines, 2010.03.04].

Keeping the governor of your own party out of the loop on your state budget plan sounds almost dysfunctional. What bugs me more is that this budget plan was kept secret from 99.999% of the rest of us, too.

I've talked previously, here on the blog and in academic work, about the importance of citizen participation in government budget processes. Government openness and transparency are perhaps nowhere more important than in the process of deciding how to spend our money. The Republicans' hunkering down behind closed doors to set priorities for everyone in South Dakota diminishes our sense of trust and ownership, just as it does here in Madison, where our city commission, Chamber, economic development corp, school administration... well, heck, darn near every public official approaches policy decisions as if they have to be kept secret and handled strictly by a few privileged insiders.

Other places are finding ways to involve citizens in public budgeting. The city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, started a wave of participatory budgeting experiments in Brazil in 1989. It's not a perfect model—you need to make an extra effort to make sure the process isn't dominated by wealthy folks and to reach out to citizens in poverty who are often shut out of public affairs. But is a messy public process any less perfect than a few puffed up legislators playing budget kings in secret?

Secret and state government don't belong in the same sentence. The budget belongs to all of us. We should have all ideas out on the table from the start, open for discussion by everyone. Yes, that means that when an idea like cutting SDPB comes up, some of us will raise hell. But some of us will also engage in honest conversation and make some progress toward uncovering public sentiment.

We have the tools available to open up the budget and pretty much everything else our Legislature handles to public discussion. Our legislators can and should still make the final decisions. But this Web-thingy makes it possible for them to open up the process for every citizen to contribute and debate ideas. A commitment to democracy makes it obligatory.

Correlation from Ord, Nebraska: Openness and Economic Development

Mike Knutson draws my attention to Ord, Nebraska, and that town's avidly blogging economic development director, Caleb Pollard. Pollard runs both the economic development agency and the chamber of commerce in Ord, and he still finds time to blog. He runs the community's economic development blog, Ord Sunshine Pumpers, on a free Wordpress account—no fancy domain name or web hosting for these guys!* The blog puts up new posts a few times a week. Pollard uses the blog to feature positive local business stats like this: over the last nine years, Ord has seen 100 new business start... and 78 of them are still operating.

Ord sits in the middle of Nebraska, with 2200 people in town and 4500 people in the county. My hometown of Madison has 6500 people, with 11,000-some countywide. How many new business have we started?

Ord's economic development director seems totally engaged with his community and a broader Web audience, blogging regularly to tell Ord's story.

Madison's economic development director appears to find open communication with the community a tedious challenge. After years of vague, passive-voiced, and occasionally plagiarized monthly columns in the Chamber newsletter, our economic director appears to have given up even that rare writing and hired a freelance-writer to communicate the LAIC's message. So much for authenticity.

Oh yeah, and the Ord economic development blog is open to comments. In Madison, the only major website allowing direct user participation is the Madville Times. LAIC, Chamber, MadisonSD.com, city, county, Madison Daily Leader, KJAM,—not one of them thinks you have anything worth contributing.

Ord Sunshine Pumpers demonstrates that if you want to tell your community's story (or "market" it, as I'm sure our ad-obsessed LAIC board would say), it doesn't hurt to open the doors and let the community tell that story. Ord also shows you need to have a passionate advocate at the helm, a stakeholder, someone who lives in the community who is deeply invested in seeing it succeed, someone so invested that he will write honestly, passionately, and prolifically about what's actually happening in his community.

Hmmm... that sounds so familiar....

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Update 2010.08.05: The free blog gets you started, but once you get your Web legs, you'll probably want to upgrade. After a year-plus (and 60K pageviews!) on Wordpress, the Ord Sunshine Pumpers moved up to a domain of their own, OrdNebraska.com. Pretty slick!

Blog Heaven: Obama Admin Releases Huge Database to Public

You want government transparency? President Obama's got your transparency right here, with a huge upload of public data to the Web:

The Transportation Department will post ratings for 2,400 lines of tires for consumer safety based on tire tread wear, traction performance and temperature resistance. The Labor Department will release the names of 80,000 workplaces where injuries and illness have occurred over the past 10 years.

The Medicare database has previously been available for a fee of $100 on CD ROM. Under the Obama initiative, it can be downloaded free, providing detailed breakdowns of payments for Medicare services. The Medicare data will be sortable by the type of medical service provided.

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database rates car seats for ease of use, evaluating the simplicity of instruction sheets, labels, vehicle installation features and securing the child.

"We're democratizing data," White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said Thursday in an interview [Pete Yost, "Government Posting Wealth of Data to Internet," AP via Miami Herald, 2010.01.22].

The Medicare database—once $100, now free, and in Excel and Google-Maps-ready format (well, only csv/txt for now, but they're working on it)! And the LAIC wanted $250 for its measly one-binder housing study? Take a transparency memo, Dwaine!

The Obama Administration still has a long way to go on improving government openness (expect the comment section to fill with the right's favorite talking points). But making these gobs of government data so freely available is a huge step forward. Full and easy access to government data is a necessary step toward full and easy participation in government.

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Update 2010.01.28: But the President still needs to crack some skulls down through the bureaucracy. His people are still fighting more FOIA lawsuits than his predecessor did.

Why No Town Halls... with Insurance Agents and CEOs?

Quick thought: our elected officials are catching heck for not holding more town hall meetings to answer to their constituents for their health care policies. But why don't we hear similar cries for the folks in charge of our health coverage now, our insurance agents and their managers and CEOs, to hold town halls and explain their inefficiency, their exclusion of maternity and pre-existing conditions, their unfair legal tactics and anti-competitive practices?

Surely we have at least as much cause to be enraged over the actual harm done by insurance companies and the 22,000 Americans dying for lack of health insurance each year as we do over the potential problems in an evolving House bill that hasn't even had floor debate yet.

But do I get to march into Tim Campbell's office and shake in his face a poster showing him with a Hitler mustache? I think Monica would come from behind the desk and throw me out on my ear (and I'd have it coming).

Do I get to call for the firing of the folks running DakotaCare for their unwillingness to take hard questions about fascism and euthanasia at a public meeting called by local political agitators?

Brookings and Howard Referenda: Votes Swing on Transparency

The results of this month's referenda in Brookings and Howard offer a lesson for all politicians and organizations on the value of transparency. Last week Brookings voters reversed by a 3-to-1 margin a Brookings County Commission decision to buy and raze two houses in the city's historic district and blight the area with a parking lot. This week Howard voters approved by a nearly identical margin the city's decision to vacate parts of Farmers Avenue and an alley to make way for the Rural Learning Center's new conference facility.

The difference in outcomes is due in part to the difference in the projects. The Maroney Center will actually improve the community, bringing Howard 18 more jobs, increased visitor traffic, positive publicity, and increased economic and cultural activity. Another parking lot in Brookings would only facilitate more driving, increase the urban heat island, and trigger runaway global warming.

But fears of planetary extinction probably figured less in voters' minds than the way in which each project was sold to the local electorates. The Brookings County Commission caught heck for making its decision about the proporety purchase and the parking plan without much public discussion. Howard's Rural Learning Center has made great efforts from the beginning not just to inform but to involve Miner County residents in their plans for improving Howard, including a four-month design process with numerous day-long public listening and design sessions.

The takeaway for community leaders: Operate behind closed doors, and the public likely will vote you down. Open the doors, let everyone participate, and your project will fly.

RC Chamber and SHS Disinvite Public; Right-Wingers Get Easy Blog Fodder

Bob Ellis is inflamed because someone in either Stephanie Herseth Sandlin's office or the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce or both dropped the PR ball and issued an open invitiation to a public meeting, then recanted and declared the Congresswoman would be speaking only to the RC Young Professionals Group. Then Pat Powers GOES APE with seven posts in one day saying the same thing.

Now we know what this is about. Bob Ellis wants a chance for his Tea Party friends to play out their faux-patriotic fantasies and storm some room with Stephanie Herseth Sandlin or Tim Johnson in it. They want to hyperventilate and pretend they're taking America back (from whom? other Americans?).

It is worth noting that SHS and Senator Tim Johnson held a series of public meetings on health care at the end of June and beginning of July. PP was apparently blinded by the glow of his Caps Lock key to notice the article in his local paper about a lunch and discussion SHS had with 120 of Pat's fellow Brookings residents on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, it is also worth noting that, like broken clocks, even Bob Ellis and Pat Powers manage to be correct on occasion. If the Madison Chamber of Commerce had issued an invitation for everyone to come hear Senator John Thune speak, then rescinded that invitation and said the meeting was for Chamber members only, I'd have blown some blog spitballs, too. (I'd have been blowing bigger spitballs at the Chamber of Commerce for charging $20 for lunch... and for charging Chamber members less than the rest of us to get in! Darned elitists!)

With Congress taking action on so many important issues, it's all the more important that our Congressional delegation use the August recess to get around the state and interact with as many constituents as possible. All three of our members of Congress can make a reasonable case that, even without town hall meetings, they are still making plenty of effort to communicate with South Dakotans. But the Rapid City public disinvitation makes SHS look bad, and Ellis and Powers are entitled to blow their spitballs.

Then again, Thune was in Madison Thursday, and he didn't hold a town hall meeting. When he dropped in to give his pal DeLon Mork a pat on the back for another job well done raising money for the Children's Miracle Network, Thune probably didn't take any questions on health coverage reform or anything else political. Am I outraged? No. Had I been at the Dairy Queen Thursday when Thune came in for his Blizzard, I wouldn't have raised my voice or tried to co-opt the event to serve my political purposes. There is a time and a place for everything. Politicians are obliged to be open to public, but they are also entitled to attend special events like Miracle Treat Day and give attention to groups like the Young Professionals or the Red Hatters or whomever else without undue distraction.

South Dakota's right-wing bloggissariat will have its fun with the public disinvitation snafu, and I won't try too hard to defend the Rapid City Chamber or SHS's office or whoever else caused it. Remember, I'm as interested in getting a chance to ask SHS (and Johnson and Thune) some pointed questions about health coverage reform and other issues as anyone else.

But it's also important to see this snafu for what it is: a bureaucratic failure to communicate between two offices, not a nefarious plot to hide from one's constituents.

Mad Money for LAIC: City + County = $265,000

Dwaine Chapel just got his paycheck for the year, and then some. In the span of less than 24 hours, he won approval from the city of Madison $140,000 in taxpayer subsidy for the Lake Area Improvement Corporation. He also reminded the city of an earlier pledge to kick in an additional $100,000 to the Forward Madison fund this coming fiscal year.

Then yesterday morning, Chapel secured another $25,000 from the public coffers from the Lake County Commission. That may sound pittancy compared to the city's contribution, but consider that just a couple years ago, the county commission slashed its funding of the LAIC from $15,000 to $5,000. So we county residents have just quintupled our handout to the LAIC.

But I guess we have a very different group of county commissioners now than we did two years ago. And to emphasize that difference, consider that one of those new commissioners, Dan Bohl, tells KJAM the county should be giving even more to the LAIC.

$265,000. That's a lot of money to hand over to someone who doesn't have to answer to the public. Even if the LAIC just must do its work behind closed doors, I continue to wait for Madison and Lake County to impose some clear, objective performance standards (as the City of Pierre does) to guide its handouts to this secretive, unaccountable organization.

Lake County Needs E-Records as Standard Operating Procedure, Not Afterthought

If I read last night's MDL headliner correctly, Lake County is looking at spending some money in next year's budget to scan a new batch of plats into electronic format. The equalization office is also requesting funding for the delayed Geographical Information System.

I approve of both of these moves. Lake County has lagged in putting online tools to good use. GIS will make it easier for residents, businesses, researchers, and prospective investors to get their hands on useful public information. And scanning the plats and whatever other public documents are filed in the courthouse makes it easier to share that information with citizens who want it.

But notice something: the county paid for a big document scanning not so long ago. Evidently we made a big push to get all those old papers into electronic format... and then proceeded to keep generating more paper. Will this be the pattern, that we have all of our older records on the computer, while the newest information can only be accessed on paper? That seems odd and inefficient.

What we really need is an overhaul of standard operating procedure in the courthouse. We need to move the initial creation and processing of all public documents—plats, building permits, what have you—to electronic format. Put daily back-ups on remote servers, generate hard copies as necessary, and put all those e-documents online where all citizens can access them, the way the Internet gods intended.

Granted, that sort of operational change would be a difficult and expensive change at our courthouse. It would be worth the trouble. But in the meantime, I'd settle for just having the county commission minutes and budget on the Lake County website.

Secretary LaHood Gives Us the Bird (Data)

...sorry, couldn't resist!

Another small step for government transparency: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says he'll overrrule the Federal Aviation Administration's plan to keep bird-plane collision data secret. The FAA tried to sneak this rule by, but public comments on the proposal ran 5 to 1 against.

This one's a no-brainer. The government has data on public safety hazards. Citizens have a right to know about such hazards. The data should be open, period. And if that data might discourage travelers from using some airports, perhaps that will simply motivate some airports to improve their bird-safety measures... or open up more special goose seasons. Either way, the public wins.

South Dakota Counties Still Lagging in Web Development

Hat tip to roving reporter and Madison native Steve White!

I've grumbled previously about the relative lack of information on the Lake County website. (Let's get some meeting minutes up... and commissioners! Start blogging! You too, Ken!)

But hey, at least Lake County has a website. The Sunshine Review*, a collaborative volunteer program analyzing government transparency, finds 43 out of 66 South Dakota counties don't even have a website. Most of the 23 South Dakota counties that do have websites are sorely lacking in information on the budget, taxes, audits, and contracts, all the sorts of financial data citizens need to know to keep their elected officials accountable.

Put all of South Dakota's counties together, and as a state we rank 27th in the nation, scoring only a 25.35% on the Sunshine Review's transparency scale. Looks we have some work to do all around!

*I note with mild suspicion that the Sunshine Review is sponsored by the Sam Adams Alliance. The Sunshine Review is an interesting and useful project... but the Sam Adams folks also brought us the embarrassing (but thankfully unsuccessful) SD Shovel.

Pierre City Commission Prefers Closed Government

KELO notes a story that the venerable Mr. Powers highlighted last week: the Pierre City Commission is keeping secret the names of people who have applied to fill a vacancy on that board. The commission's excuse: filling a commission vacancy is a "personnel issue."

Mr. Powers decries this thin excuse for shutting out citizens from public decisions, as do I. However, I note that we've had precedent for such closed-door actions here in Lake County. Last year's candidate search for the empty seat on the Madison Central School Board drew five applicants: the district did conduct public interviews of the two finalists, but it never made public the names of the other three candidates who sought consideration (I was one; I still haven't learned the other two). Last fall, the Lake County Commission filled a vacancy with a lightning appointment of the fourth-place finisher in the preceding Republican primary, skipping the public application process in conducted on two previous occasions.

Even my own public office, my seat on the Lake Herman Sanitary District, was filled in without any public discussion. Of course, when Keith Roskens and Larry Dirks appointed me to the seat Roskens was vacating in 2006, the action was cloaked less in secrecy than in apathy—in 30 years, we're never fielded a contested slate of candidates, and for four of the last five years, we've operated with an empty third seat. (What, no one wants to get together a couple times a year to talk about septic tanks?)

If government action pertaining to people holding elected office were just "personnel issues," then the State Senate's hearings against Senator Dan Sutton in 2007 should have been private.

The folks applying for the vacancy on the Pierre city commission understand they're not just applying for a job. They're seeking the privilege of speaking for their fellow citizens. The public deserves to know the names of those applicants and hear every bit of the discussion commissioners have in choosing the next commissioner.

Less Smoke, More Openness: Good Signs in South Dakota

And in happy news, South Dakota takes two more steps forward... or is that two big breaths of fresh air? Governor Rounds signs both the smoking ban and the open records law.

I don't get to pat the Governor on the back much, so let me do so here. SB 147 and HB 1240 are good laws that deserve passage, and Governor Rounds, you have done the right thing in signing them. Thank you, sir, for shifting freedom from those doing harm to those just trying to breathe. And thank you for giving all of us citizens a little more oversight of our government.

One caveat: as I look through the final version of SB 147, unless I'm misreading the amendments, I don't see quite the sweeping presumption of openness contained in the original bill. It's still better than what we had before... but there's still room for improvement.

Open Online Records Good for South Dakota, America, and Democracy

As the House takes up SB 147 on open records and SB 143 on maintaining those open records online, our legislators and Governor should see what Vivek Kundra, our newly appointed federal chief information officer, says about public records:

“I’m driving a transparency and open government agenda to make sure that the public has access to information and to government, and we rethink how the government interacts with the public in an information economy....”

“One of things we plan to embark on is launching Data.gov... which would democratize data and give data back to the public. The challenge -- whether it’s citizens, NGOs, [or] the private sector -- is to help us think through how we address some of the toughest problems in the public sector,” he said. Data.gov would publish data feeds of a vast array of data, he stated.

“We need to make sure that all that data that’s not private can be made public,” Kundra said. “What we should be thinking about is how do we begin with the assumption that the default be that we put information out into the public domain, and the second question is, what needs to be private and not the other way around,” he said [Mary Mosquera, "Kundra Named Federal CIO, Vows to Make More Data Public," Washington Technology, 2009.03.05].

Both SB 147 and SB 143 are on the right track, recognizing that we can use open records and the Internet to help generate ideas and make government more accountable than ever before. Let's Governor Rounds will sign on to the Information Age and sign these bills.

Status Quo Not Good Enough, Russ: Support SB 147 and Open Records

I meant to give some love to the Black Hills Monitor, which gave friendly coverage last weekend to SB 147, the big open records bill Senate leaders Knudson and Heidepriem and House leaders Faehn and Hunhoff are promoting. Wow—look at all those Republicans and Democrats working together. SB 147 must be a good idea!

I was disappointed to see no District 8 legislators among the co-sponsors. As I look around for other pending open records legislation, I do find Senator Russell Olson (R-8/Lake Madison) among the sponsors of SB 143, which would require the governor to continue the OPEN SD public records website he started last year.

While I appreciate Senator Olson's support of this valuable online resource (where I can look up my profs' salaries... but not mine! hmmm...), I must note that this bill really doesn't do anything. Unless I missed something, Governor Rounds has not targeted Open.SD.Gov in his budget cuts.

Plus, if I wanted to be suspicious of Governor Rounds and his commitment to open records (now why on earth would I feel that way?) , I see language in this bill that might help him keep more records away from the public. SB 143 calls on the governor to "continue the OPEN SD website as existing on January 1, 2009." A governor interested in blocking further records access could interpret that line to mean no new information may be added to the website. Oops—might want to propose an amendment there!

When South Dakota has consistently ranked last in open government, the status quo is clearly not good enough. Russ, Gerry, Mitch, get on board with SB 147. Let's see some real openness in South Dakota government.

South Dakota Budget: Step One Is Open Government

Kevin Woster has blogged it. David Newquist has mentioned it in an e-mail, as has Sam Kephart. And the more I think about it, the more it makes sense: open government may be the root of our state budget problem.

Lots of us South Dakotans are getting our dander up over the state budget and the cuts proposed by Governor Rounds (well detailed by Dr. Newquist, who identifies the governor's targeting of "culture, education, workers, and the disadvantaged"). The volume and number of voices is rising, and that's good: the more people speaking up and making clear their budget priorities, the better chance we have of seeing a budget that attends to the popular will.

But how can we make a budget if we don't have all the information about the budget? We have a need and a right to see the public records of our own state government's activities, yet Governor Michael Rounds maintains the position that records are private until proven public. He blows a little smoke about protecting individual rights, but really, his position boils down to an arrogant elitism. He's really saying, "I get to look at the information, and you don't."

We also need more open contracts. Sam Kephart writes that the governor has issued 3,400 no-bid contracts in the last twelve months. The Board of Regents has similar power to offer "no-bid contracts and exclusive supplier arrangements" [Kephart, e-mail, 2009.01.25].

If our budget really requires serious fixing, everyone involved in the budget—legislators, workers, vendors, taxpayers, the whole bunch of us—need the most complete picture possible of how that budget works. We need to know we are spending our money as efficiently as possible. Toward that end, every transaction of our money must be open to bid and review to every citizen of this state, not just the handful privileged to go to work on the second floor of the Capitol.

Everybody from President Obama to Governor Rounds's pal Sarah Palin, from Senate Majority Leader Dave Knudson to Sibby, says good government is open government. Governor Rounds should boot his old "It's good to be king!" thinking and accept that all those papers he signs really belong to us.

Research: LAIC Needs Openness, Local Ownership

While working on some potential dissertation material yesterday, I read an academic paper (you know, real research, egghead stuff that MBAs and MPAs read) that put into perspective what the Lake Area Improvement Corporation does wrong as it tries to stimulate the Lake County economy. Short form: the LAIC follows a top-down management model that avoids openness and broad participation. This exclusionary technocracy, a presumption that the inner circle and experts know best and that involving the public only gums up the works, hurts the sense of local ownership and the credibility of the organization and its efforts.

Deborah Bräutigam's 2004 paper "The People’s Budget? Politics, Participation and Pro-Poor Policy” looks at the effectiveness of participatory political efforts in promoting the interests of the poor. Reviewing the recent history of development policy at the macroeconomic level (big national programs, World Bank projects), Bräutigam finds exclusionary technocracy was assumed to be a good thing in the early 1990s. Get some experts, insulate them political pressures (e.g., the existing government and bureaucracy, elections... public oversight), let them undertake projects by decree [p. 655].

This exclusion of elected officials and the public triggered calls for more openness, transparency, and participation. Bräutigam quotes former Brazilian finance minister Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira from a 1993 paper:

...if democracy is not to be undermined as a consequence of economic reforms, the representative organisations and institutions must participate actively in the formulation and implementation of the reform program, even if this participation weakens the logic of the economic program or increases its cost [Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, José Maravall, and Adam Przeworski, Economic Reform in New Democracies: A Social-Democratic Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993].

Bräutigam also notes that other researchers have found increased participation makes policies more sustainable, better designed, and easier to implement. Involve interested parties, and they're less likely to raise hell (or write cranky blog posts) when you implement your program.

Bräutigam cites World Bank research that finds increased participation boosts the sense of public ownership and credibility of the organization and its policies. By World Bank standards, studies of areas where policies are to be implemented "are supposed to be 'locally generated' and 'owned' by the country concerned" [p. 656].

Meanwhile, our LAIC still thinks it's 1990. How does the LAIC fail to follow the open, participatory principles that are being adopted by organizations all the way up to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund?

• Openness: I still can't find a roster of the LAIC board on its website. Online I have to go to the Secretary of State's archive of corporate annual reports to find out who's calling the shots.
  
• Local studies: The LAIC consistently hires out-of-state consultants to study the local economy.
• Openness: The LAIC keeps the results of those studies proprietary instead of sharing the data freely with the public to help everyone make better decisions.
• Participation: The LAIC promised to roll out a Main Street program last year, complete with "a few meetings to bring all interested parties together in one place to establish our vision and mission statement." I know interested parties who have volunteered to participate in that effort. Those parties have not heard anything from the LAIC on when those meetings will take place.
• Openness: The LAIC-ICAP housing partnership didn't hit the papers until this week, after the building permits were filed and the first hole was dug—in other words, until the LAIC couldn't keep the plan quiet any longer. There doesn't seem to be any reason to have kept the plan quiet. Putting up two affordable spec houses to address the needs identified in the housing study seems perfectly reasonable. If the LAIC had stepped forward with this plan right away in 2007, their openness might have inspired greater confidence in the whole tax increment finance district plan and drawn useful public feedback that might have made the plan even better.
  

Research and experience say that if you want a plan to work, you have to involve your stakeholders. In the LAIC's plans, we are all stakeholders. Let's hope new LAIC board members Jeff Bloom and Chris Giles will promote a more open and participatory LAIC.

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Read the full paper: Deborah Bräutigam, “The People’s Budget? Politics, Participation and Pro-Poor Policy,” Development Policy Review ( U.K.), 2004, v. 22, n. 6, pp. 653-668.