Transparency

Show us the money

We’d all like to know exactly how the government spends our hard earned tax dollars.

Next year’s county budget proceedings could be very ugly given the financial meltdown, implosion of property values and bad economy.

In Washington and Richmond, it will be business as usual, leaving the (literally) poor taxpayer with little clue how and why public money is spent.

Perhaps on the local level things could change.

During the citizen comment portion of the August Goochland Board of Supervisors’ meeting several speakers suggested that the county’s check register be put online.

There is precedent for such action.

In Sedgewick County, Kansas (at https://ssc.sedgwickcounty.org/checkbook/default.aspx government expenditures are posted online for all the world to see. The website also includes a telephone number should citizens have any questions.

This is a relatively simple and effective way for local government to fulfill the promise of operational transparency.

Goochland’s annual budget process has gotten more obscure as government has become more complicated.

Up to a few years ago, a budget notebook was prepared for each supervisor and available to other interested parties for a nominal fee. This book listed detailed budget requests, which included the current salary for department heads and proposed wage and benefit increases. It outlined expenditures for items needed to fulfill the obligations of the department in detail.

The supervisors then met with all department heads in a day long marathon intended to give the board insight about daily county operations. In reality, most supervisors seemed bored and a few used it as an opportunity to bully their least favorite county employees.

Each department put on its best face and presented carefully crafted justification for every expenditure.

The board supposedly used the insight gained from those meetings to differentiate between necessary expenditures and extras. Departments, anticipating reductions, increased their requests so that after all the dust settled, there would be sufficient funds to get the job done.


Input from those meetings was used supposedly to craft a budget.
As part of the kabuki theater of the budget process a public hearing is held about a week before the board’s April meeting when it votes to set the tax rates retroactive to January 1. A highlight of the budget hearing is carefully choreographed presentations by teachers, parents and adorable students to protest any reductions in the amounts earmarked for the schools.

To its credit, the school board 2009 budget request was less than that in 2008.

The April vote is needed to ensure that the tax bills can be prepared in a timely manner so they can be mailed out well in advance of the early June due date for the first semiannual payment.

Although the supervisors use budget requests to decide how much money each department really needs to function, they do not mandate that every penny be spent according to the proposed budget. Departments have the flexibility to allocate the funds as they see fit, which provides the opportunity for prudent use of public dollars.

That is important because stuff happens and things can change radically between the adoption of an annual budget and the end of the fiscal year. For instance, when the 2008-09 budget was drafted, the school system had no idea that gas prices would soon head for the stratosphere.

Sounds good on paper. Unfortunately it seems as though the tax rate was decided upon sometime in the fall, long before the start of the budget process. In recent years, the budget numbers seem to have been determined by working backwards to ensure that it balances with the revenue generated by the predetermined tax rate.

Throughout the year, addendums are made to the money spent by the county. Each addendum is advertised showing proposed increases and source money, a public hearing is held, which usually generates no public comment, and the addition is voted into place. At the end of the year, it’s difficult to figure out just how much money the county spent or exactly where it comes from.

The official budget then, seems to be a guesstimate as to how much will be spent in a given fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30.

Posting the county’s check register for all to see, however, will give citizens a good idea where the money goes.

The Sedgewick checkbook however, shows lacks a category that consumes the lion’s share of Goochland public revenue, the school system.

In Kansas, school boards have the authority to levy and collect the taxes that fund education.

In Virginia, even though our school boards are elected by the citizens, funds for education are controlled by the governing board of each jurisdiction.

One of the problems with educational funding in Virginia is that school boards must beg for funds from generally disinterested governing boards resulting in a lack of meaningful accountability for school dollars.

The school budget is roughly equal to all of the property taxes collected in Goochland.

Because of the usually adversarial relationship between the supervisors and the school board, details about the county education system are shrouded in mystery. Rumor thrives in an information vacuum to the detriment of all.

Virginia’s local governing boards will never cede control over huge school budgets so the system will never improve, but that’s another issue.

Taxpayers must know how their money is spent in the name of the public good.

They must also have access to the actions of those who act on behalf of citizens.

Records and minutes of public boards should also be posted online for anyone to see at any time.

In addition to minutes of meetings of the supervisors and planning commission, background information packets should be permanently available on the county website.

Transparency in government is a fancy way of saying that citizens must not be kept in the dark about the manner in which government conducts its business.

Goochland is blessed to have many smart people living within its borders. Some have a lot of book learning, many a gracious plenty of native intelligence and common sense. A few have both and they’re all quite capable of understanding when they’re being bamboozled.

Open the doors, open the books and open the records. The result of secrecy and obfuscation is massive mistrust of government. Let the sun shine in!