26 States Have Open, Accessible Government
Why not New Hampshire?
The State of Alabama has a website that lets the world know exactly how it spends its money -- and why. Spend a few minutes looking through the site, and you can find out how the State's Department of Natural Resources is planning to expand the number of acres under wildlife management. You can find out how the State's Tourism Department is planning to increase the number of hotel night stays. You can see agencies' budget requests, their planning documents, their analyses of how many employees are needed to provide specific state services.
The State of Utah's website has all of its spending on-line. Spend a few minutes looking through the site, and you can find the exact specifications for the highway maintenance truck that was purchased on July 16, 2009. You can find the exact amount of money the state spends on health insurance for the employees of each department. You can track comp time usage, payouts for excess accumulated leave, the amount of money each agency spent on out-of-state travel.
It's all there, online, for anyone to see. And not just in Alabama and Utah -- so far, 26 states have websites that detail government spending.
But here in New Hampshire, to find basic information, the SEA had to actually negotiate access to the State's "Sunspot" intranet system -- right there in Article 3.12 of the 2007-09 Collective Bargaining Agreement. And then, Department of Administrative Services Commissioner Linda Hodgdon tells the world that the information we found on Sunspot isn't reliable.
Here in New Hampshire, we have the Local Government Center arguing about whether state securities regulators have the right to look at the LGC's financial records.
Here in New Hampshire, we have a closed government. In March 2008, the Pew Center on the States ranked New Hampshire worst-in-the-nation in terms of government performance.
"Because the state lacks good cost and performance data and has no long-term strategic direction, budget cuts and other allocation decisions are necessarily inefficient. ...New Hampshire lacks robust expenditure data for budgeted items that might inform future planning and budgeting decisions. ...The lack of financial data contributes to budgeting challenges because the state cannot easily access timely expenditure data for the purposes of projecting future outlays."
Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson observed that "The same prudence, which, in private life, would forbid our paying our money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public moneys."
Fiscal prudence is part of our way of life, here in New Hampshire. We deserve the opportunity to see how our public monies are being spent -- just like the residents of Alabama and Utah can see how their monies are being spent.