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GOP advances bills requiring public disclosure on government Web sites

By dmc-admin

Published: June 12, 2009 at 1:00 am

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted June 9 to advance two proposals aimed at allowing residents to review exactly how local governments spend their tax dollars.
Republicans on the committee, such as Sen. Al Melvin of Tucson and Sen. Russell Pearce of Mesa, spoke of sunshine and transparency. Democrats, meanwhile, said the legislation would burden local governments with unnecessary duties and costs.
The legislation, if successful, would require the creation of government-operated Web sites that would detail how much cities, counties, towns, school districts and universities spend and what exactly they buy with public resources.
S1441, a proposal principally sponsored by Melvin, requires disclosure of payments, purposes, funding sources and recipients of expenditures made by local governments and public entities.
Melvin cited former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as the bill was introduced, indicating a degree of public distrust in the way local governments spend their money.
“The greatest disinfectant known to man is sunshine,” Melvin said. "That is what this bill is about."
Cities, counties and school districts that would be responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Web sites opposed the idea.
League of Arizona Cities and Towns lobbyist Dale Wiebush said the effort ran contrary to earlier agreements that the state would “slow down and hold off on additional regulatory items” hoisted upon local governments during the sluggish economy.
“We've been laying people off and cutting our budgets,” he said. “It's a bad time for us.”
Fifteen Arizona cities have yet to launch Web sites. And cities that offer information on a Web site receive only minimal visits to pages posted with accounting information, said Wiebush.
“I'm not sure about the bang for the buck here,” he said.
Sen. Ron Gould, a Republican from Lake Havasu City, said the benefits of transparency outweigh the costs of running the Web sites. He said his local government refused to provide a free photocopy of the city's budget when he ran for city council in 2002.
“It only takes one community activist to go to a Web site and find something that shouldn't be there,” he said.
Melvin shrugged off claims that costs would be prohibitive, saying there are cheap off-the-shelf software programs that provide the ability to disclose information to the public.
Pearce said he intends to get “something done this session that is meaningful to the taxpayer.”
The bill passed by a 7-4 margin, split along party lines.
S1142, a similar measure proposed by Tucson Republican Sen. Jonathan Paton, also advanced. The proposal requires cities, towns, and county treasurers to create Internet databases tracking all receipts and expenditures of public money within one- or two-year timeframes.
Cities and towns with more than 300,000 people would have until Jan. 1, 2010, to establish the transparency-orientated Web sites, while those below that threshold would have a deadline of Jan. 1, 2011.
The county government threshold is set at 500,000 residents, which effectively requires Maricopa and Pima counties to create the financial tracking programs by the beginning of next year. Treasurers in the state’s 13 smaller counties would be given until 2011.
The bill also would move up a similar deadline imposed last year for state agencies. S1235 was signed into law in July 2008, and the law ordered the Department of Administration to produce an operational financial disclosure Web site by 2011.
Paton’s S1142 moves that deadline forward to 2010. But Department of Administration spokesman Alan Ecker told committee members the department would be unable to comply with the mandate until 2011.
DOA originally pegged the cost of implementing a state spending Web site at $100 million, but Ecker told the Arizona Capitol Times subsequent amendments to S1235 that removed highly detailed disclosure requirements for state contracts brought down the price of the project.
The amendments eliminated the need to purchase a new state accounting software program, he said, noting the state still uses COBOL-based (Common Oriented Business Language) accounting software.
“The cost of transparency depends on where you are starting from,” he said. “We’re starting from the Dark Ages and were trying to get into modern times.”
Now, the state expects to spend $300,000 to $500,000 to create its financial disclosure Web site.
Ecker said state officials have consulted with other states that have implemented similar Web sites and have found that software programs required to display government spending on the Internet are somewhat cheap.
For example, officials in Alaska spent $12,000 on a software program to achieve the goal. But the real expense, said Ecker, is incurred when states are forced to “warehouse” mounds of existing data in a usable format to upload the information to the software.
That requirement cost Alaska $5 million, he said.
In an April report, George Mason University stated about 20 states have created Web sites that track state spending through either legislation or executive order. The study found that the states spent an average of $130,000 to develop the Web sites and that states often “overestimate” the associated costs.
The Arizona Department of Administration is required to issue a report detailing the “progress and plans of the full implementation” of the state spending database to the governor, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate president on Sept. 1.

ARIZONA LEGISLATIVE REPORT

GOP advances bills requiring public disclosure on government Web sites

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