A $450 round-trip flight to Toronto for an Onondaga County industrial development specialist. Meals for $213 during a three-day trip to Washington, D.C, for a county economic project manager. A travel bill totaling $5,048 over six days on a trip to Chicago by two county health care employees.
Those are among the spending items that taxpayers can now look up with a few mouse clicks, thanks to Project Sunshine, an online initiative for a more transparent government in Onondaga County. Here’s the link: http://www.ongov.net/comptroller/travel.html
“Transparency is the big buzzword in government right now,” Comptroller Robert Antonacci said. “We thought that putting up travel expenses would be a step in the right direction.”
The initiative was launched on Feb. 7 by Antonacci and the county’s Department of Audit and Control.
The project is called “sunshine” because it places government spending in the public light. Information on some of the county’s spending is updated monthly. This allows citizens to scrutinize their government and come to more informed conclusions about how their taxes are being spent, Antonacci said.
The county’s effort gets applause from open-records advocates. But, some say, governments could do even more in the digital age. The Internet fosters quick and easy information disclosure, open-records advocates say. But they acknowledge that the openness has costs.
Full transparency could be a financial burden, warned Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse-based data gathering and distribution organization. Governments have to pay people to publish all this information,” said Long. “The more you publish, the more you spend. There are always two sides to the coin. A democratic system is not cheap.”
Federal records are available under the Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. The law does not require governments to publish their records, said
Roy Gutterman, law professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “The government’s only legal obligation is to make its records available when someone asks for them,” Gutterman said. “Agencies are allowed to deny you certain information—but the burden is on the government to justify any denial.”
Voluntary record publication can engage and educate the public, say open-records advocates. Liz Bartolomeo, spokeswoman for the Sunlight Foundation, a privately-funded open government organization based in Washington, D.C., urged wider use of the Internet to promote citizens’ participation in government.
“We believe that an engaged community is the key to democracy,” said Bartolomeo. “Combining technology with open government is the best way to accomplish that goal.”
For example, the Sunlight Foundation successfully lobbied for a rule requiring proposed federal legislation to be made public online for 72 hours before the U.S. Congress votes on them. This gives citizens time to share their opinions on a bill with their members of Congress vote, Bartolomeo said.
Bob Freeman, executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government, a public organization that ensures the state observes open government law, suggests that “proactive disclosure” of commonly requested records to save money in the long run.
“If a government places its records online before anyone asks, it keeps them from having to pay people to process Freedom of Information requests and find the records,” said Freeman, who has directed New York’s open government committee since it was established in 1974. “Yes, posting the information is an expense, but once it’s up, it’s up for good—and nobody has to go digging for it.”
Freeman praised the law’s adaptability to changing times and new technologies. “When the bill was signed in 1966, ‘high-tech’ was an electric typewriter. Nobody could have foreseen the power of the Internet,” Freeman said. “However, our law has been drafted in a way that can accommodate information technology.”
In Onondaga County, the Project Sunshine faces some restrictions on what it can make available, said Antonacci, the comptroller. The itemized travel records of the offices of the sheriff and the district attorney, for example, are withheld to protect the whereabouts of high-level public officials, he said. But the offices’ total monthly travel budget is published. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 9, the two offices posted travel expenditures of $17,667.30.
And Antonacci’s Department of Audit and Control faces financial constraints. He would like to expand the project to include the county’s legal claims, Antonacci said. But, he said, the task of publishing the 300 monthly claims would overload his office. Instead, he plans to publish a sample of claims.
“If money was no object,” Antonacci said, “we would publicize every expense—from sewage treatment to peanuts for the elephants at the zoo.”
(Michael Leess is a senior newspaper and online journalism major.)
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