From the Legislative Desk

Government Transparency Requires Funding

Openness in government — nowadays there’s a lot of chatter about the need for transparency in local governments. Transparency in government can be a real good thing. As another measure of accountability, hardly anyone opposes the provision of a system that openly informs the public about what its government is doing.

A survey of our citizens in most, if not all, communities would likely indicate strong support for a government system based upon openness and candor. However, you might get an entirely different outcome if the survey posed a condition on having transparency, such as an increase in taxes to pay for it — in the case of county government transparency, a corresponding increase in ad valorem taxes.

Survey responses largely depend on how a specific question is framed. Because counties rely rather substantially on revenue derived from ad valorem taxes, it is fair to characterize state unfunded mandates as an increase in property taxes. Certainly there is support for transparency in county government, but the cost of implementing it should not cause taxes to go up.

A joint venture is the preferred method of collaboration — if there is strong collaboration among government representatives and businesses, non-profits and individuals in the private sector, the opportunity to achieve a viable and effective system of transparency is much better than without it. When the venture is a collaborative one, government gets first-hand information on what works best and what is useful, and the taxpayer has the opportunity to experience government’s challenges. There is a good bit of the puzzle missing in terms of how much an electronic transparency system would cost a county and whether those costs would vary among counties.

Happy holidays — as we head into the last leg of this first decade of the 21st century, may all your efforts to serve the public be successful, productive and appreciated.