Saturday, February 21, 2009

This isn't what we meant by "transparency"

Apparently Senate President David Williams and House Speaker Greg Stumbo, fresh off agreeing to raise taxes and raid the public employee health fund, are still looking for common ground.

Their next area of agreement appears to be giving the legislature extraordinary regulatory powers over the functions of the rest of state government, including secret meetings, reports that would not be subject to open records laws, and findings that would only be available to public view after an annual report is accepted by the legislature.

Senate Bill 188 is here. Speaker Stumbo told the Louisville Courier Journal he intends to file a similar bill on Monday.

I'm interested to hear why setting up a new, powerful government bureaucracy to police government activity and keep the public out is preferable to putting government activities such as spending and contracts on the internet for everyone to see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Because it seems to me that instead of self regulating themselves and putting their information on the internet for all to see including the awarding of contracts and every other piece of public information, they would rather hide things.

So instead what you have is another big bureaucracy that is going to handle everything including sweeping more stuff under the rug and ends up being needed to be investigated.

It amazes me that the citizens of this state are not up in arms about these injustices especially when they are being raided by the tax system for 5.8 percent income taxes and a 6 percent sales tax. Not to mention every other tax under the sun.

Its pretty atrocious that this state cannot get its fiscal act together in a time when most of us are cutting back and trying to conserve our resources. If we can do this, why can't the increasingly out of touch state legislature get the point

Anonymous said...

The corrupt ones are protecting their turf. Williams et al should be ashamed.