Transparency Roundup
By admin • Dec 2nd, 2009 • Category: TransparencyStimulus Leads to Better State Level Reporting | The Richmond Times-Dispatch
NextGov reports on positive side-effects of the stimulus’ disclosure and transparency provisions:
Recovery.gov’s Success | The Richmond Times-Dispatch
We spend a lot of time talking about how Government does a lot wrong with data. And we harass them and complain a lot to the extent that even I get on my own nerves. But the fact is, the people and programmers working on these projects on the inside are neither malicious nor incompetent. The problem isn’t people, but a weird system of priorities and incentives that often leaves the citizen short-handed.
Recovery Board Chairman Can’t Certify That Data Is Accurate, Auditable | The Richmond Times-Dispatch
Recovery.gov is supposed to be a transparency clearing house for information on the federal stimulus spending appropriated in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year. Unfortunately, the reports on spending and jobs saved or created are showing errors across the board.
FederalReporting.gov: Recovery.gov’s Little Secret: | The Richmond Times-Dispatch
The press would have you believe that Recovery.gov is an $18MM website that collects loan, contract, and grant data from recipients and shows it to end users. But that’s only half true in a lot of ways.
Get Your Act Together, Data.gov | The Richmond Times-Dispatch
On May 21st, we launched Apps for America 2: the Data.gov Challenge – the very same day that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra & Company launched data.gov. On May 26th, Kundra announced that there were hundreds of thousands of data sources just around the corner.
It is now November 13th, 2009. Right now the Raw Data Catalog in data.gov stands at an even 600 feeds. What’s worse, the data is chunked up into small little bits, making 600 not a particularly exciting number.
Transparency Squandered | Matthew Yglesias
In an interesting decision, Nancy Pelosi agreed earlier this year to start releasing more details online about what House members spend their office expense allocation on. Predictably this kind of well-intentioned transparency initiative serves mostly to reduce the public’s understanding of what’s going on.
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We talk a lot about transparency and Virginia has a pretty spiffy site called Commonwealth Datapoint but you know one thing that is not very transparent at all in Virginia is transportation.
Ideally, every county and every city in Virginia would know just how much gas tax revenue it generates just like it currently knows how much it generates in property tax, sales tax, and just about every other kind of tax – but not the gas tax.
This is important because without this info – most folks just have no idea how much they actually pay for transportation nor how much it costs to provide them with roads, maintenance, operation and new roads and improvements.
It’s all monopoly money from Richmond.
and this leads to another problem – which is most folks “think” that it is the state that funds transportation and that allows local politicians to exploit that ignorance by telling their constituents that the state has ‘failed to fund” transportation – as if – if voters yelled at Richmond – they’d shower everyone with more transportation money from the money tree they keep in the GA.
Thus, few people understand that the backstory to the state “stepping up and funding transportation” is … higher taxes on everyone.
Then we have a 3rd problem. People think that they will get more from the state that other localities.
then the 4th problem.
The average person in Virginia has NO CLUE how much money the gas tax actually generates.
That number is approximately – one penny = 50 million.
Now if you go through the numbers – you’ll soon discover that 50 million dollars will buy about 5 miles of new road or one or two interchanges …. so it would take a HUGE increase in the gas tax to generate substantial money.
VDOT’s current budget has shrunk to “only” about 3 BILLION dollars and if people thought VDOT needed to get back to it’s previous level of about 4 billion dollars – it would take 20 cents increase on the gas tax – obviously a number guaranteed to gain the ardent support of about 5% of Virginians.
At any rate – BEcause Virginia is not very transparent on transportation funding – the public does not understand the dimensions of the problem – nor do they know who to hold accountable for solutions.
I don’t think Bob McDonnell is going to make much of a dent in this problem by selling the liquor stores or dilling off the coast or tolling existing Interstates (currently illegal by the Feds).
So.. why don’t one of you BR “regulars” write a tome on transportation funding in Va?