Rick Sincere has an excellent post (compete with video!) of the press conference yesterday at which a proposal to create greater budget transparency was introduced.
It’s a good step forward — Virginians deserve to know where their money is being spent and, perhaps, legislators and others will feel a greater degree of responsibility for ensuring that those funds are spend wisely.
Well I can dream, can’t I?
Politically, the measure has an interesting number of supporters. Sens. Cuccinelli and Petersen were on hand to give their backing for it, and they were joined, either in person or by proxy, LTG Bill Bolling, AG Bob McDonnell and a number of Delegates. Where is the Governor in all this? Discussions have taken place with his policy people, so he’s at least being kept in the loop, if not yet on board.
I suggest he does. While transparency alone is no guarantee that the worthies will become better stewards of our money, it does create a means through which (some) taxpayers will be able to track spending, question priorities and perhaps even offer constructive feedback. (I can still dream, right?)
Rick pulled this editorial from the Free Lance-Star, which I think frames the matter extremely well:
A couple of existent programs nibble around the edges of what the senator and his co-patrons hope to accomplish. Virginia Performs, an administration creation, rates the progress of state agencies in pursuing quality-of-life goals. The state Auditor of Public Accounts’ Commonwealth Data Point, a Web site, paints a broad-brush portrait of how state government operates, including in the budgetary realm. But both programs are deficient in the all-important “fine print” category.
Mr. Kaine should support this transparency initiative, not because it would make his life easier operationally–the measure, for example, would expose to the cyberized world the practice of some state agencies to shift funds among program accounts–but because in principle it’s the right and progressive thing to do. The money with which the legislative cardinalate and administration nabobs play government is the people’s money. They should be able to see what becomes of it, quickly and easily, every step of the way.
I think the measure’s backers had an editorial board with the RTD, too. I couldn’t find any mention of it in the online paper today (though Robert Frost manages to get a couple of inches…yeesh).