Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Gov. Beshear, your web site stinks!

Here is the latest data on Gov. Steve Beshear's phoney baloney "eTransparency" web site he put up with much fanfare in January and to the delight of the Lexington Herald Leader:

House Democrats killed off an effort to mandate meaningful government spending transparency again this session. Senate Republicans didn't do much better, though there is some hope for next year thanks to Sen. Damon Thayer.

Can't imagine why they are so opposed to letting us know what they are doing with our money, can you?

1 comment:

Bruce Maples said...

Well ... I guess the nicest thing to say is "it's a start."

I mean -- some of the entries are pretty simple to understand. "Electric bill," for example.

But by limiting the records returned to 10 per page, they've made it pretty difficult to pull down all the records and do some serious data mining. Intentionally, or not.

There's also very little detail behind the data rows. The biggest missing detail is the payee (vendor). I can understand why -- vendors probably don't want the hassle. Still, it'd be nice to see who is the Halliburton of Kentucky.

Even so -- you can find some interesting things. I did a search in the Transportation Cabinet for Pro Contract items in 2009, which includes Personal Services contracts. (Whole blog entry just on PS contracts.)

Here's the Office of Legal Services of the Transportation Cabinet, spending $791,185 on ... Legal Services. Apparently, they need help getting out the 1099s in January.

THERE's an expense I'd like to know more about.

Thanks for the tip, David. I think I've got my next blog post. :-)