Transparency can save bucks
While New Mexico policymakers face some tough and likely divisive budget decisions in the upcoming legislative session, one important issue has gained support across the political and ideological spectra.
The issue is government transparency and, when judged from the perspective of just a few years ago, New Mexico has made tremendous strides towards having more transparent, user-friendly government.
A few of the major accomplishments include:
• Webcasting of legislative floor proceedings and legislative interim committee meetings;
• The posting of floor votes from both legislative houses online;
• The creation of a statewide transparency website that includes a wide variety of state spending and payroll information (due to launch soon);
• The creation of a transparency portal called “ABQ View” for the city of Albuquerque.
This is all for the better, and efforts like these go a long way toward making government more accountable to taxpayers while giving journalists, community activists and watchdogs — not to mention government officials themselves — the ability to look at government’s finances and work to find inefficiencies and waste.
But there’s much more work to be done.
Consider this: New Mexico’s K-12 school system consumes approximately 50 percent of the state’s budget. It’s the largest single-ticket item we buy as state taxpayers.
In order to follow that money, the public must be able to drill down into district budgets. Therefore, the first expansion of our powerful new Sunshine Portal should be the inclusion of K-12 financials.
The Rio Grande Foundation already has been working to compile that information and make it available to the public. It has requested basic payroll information and vendor-transaction data from school districts statewide.
The results thus far, operating under current law, have been mixed to say the least. Like many curious citizens seeking public records, the foundation has encountered numerous excuses, delays and prohibitive fees of more than $1,000.
This is simply not good enough.
Ultimately, the public schools work for the people who pay their bills — the taxpayers — and taxpayers should be able to examine how their money is being spent. As it stands now, even dedicated researchers have to overcome difficult obstacles in order to check up on local governments.
And for the average citizen? It’s simply too hard, too time-consuming and too costly.
In this day and age, when government budget data of all types is available at the click of a mouse, there is simply no excuse for New Mexico’s school districts to be able to demand a tremendous investment of time and money from anyone who wants to examine the district’s books.
Moreover, the state’s current budget crisis means we no longer can afford opaque, inefficient systems — we can’t afford not to invest in transparency.
Rather than being a new, expensive budget item, transparency initiatives can actually result in cost savings.
In Texas, which has been a pioneer in government transparency, the state’s analysts used their transparency site to discover that each agency was obtaining toner from separate suppliers and wasting money on unnecessary microfilming. This realization led to $10 million in savings when the state negotiated a new contract with a central supplier.
Inefficiencies like this one are undoubtedly hiding in the budgets of New Mexico’s schools, and it’s time we all get to work finding and fixing them.
Also signed by Steve Allen of Common Cause, Paul J. Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation and Terri Cole of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce.