State’s transparency site goes online amid questions

DENVER – Colorado’s transparency Web site is on-line, offering what the Governor’s Office calls “easy Internet access” to the state’s checkbook.

But leaders of the state’s grassroots transparency movement say it amounts to little more than an Internet presentation of the state budget, offering too little information in too general a fashion. and is too hard to navigate.

The site, www.tops.state.co, is only days old and continues to evolve, said Megan Castle, Governor’s Office spokeswoman.

“According to the Governor and Treasurer Kennedy their new transparency Web site ‘sets the standard’ for transparency.  Well if this is the standard for transparency then they set the bar very low,” said Amy Oliver Cooke, publisher of  the Colorado Spending Transparency blog COST.

“The site is very short on detail and even shorter on context,” Cooke said.

Natalie Menten, who teamed with Cooke and others to jump-start state’s Transparency movement, agreed.

“You know what this is about, it’s about padding legitimate categories” by putting such things as meals and visits to trendy coffee shops under such categories as “other operating expenses,” Menten said. “They have a ‘meals’ expense category, so putting it under these legitimate-sounding things is baloney.”  

But State Comptroller David McDermott, whose office is charged with operating the TOP site, said the detailed information sought by Transparency advocates is unlikely to show up during the evolution of the site.

“ There’s evolution to be done, but it won’t affect” the lack of detail cited by critics of the site, he said. “This is the level of detail we have in our accounting system.”

More detailed records are maintained at the departmental level, but the state’s “Chart of accounts” is about 494 pages long, including 74 pages listing just the account numbers, McDermott said.

“That’s the level at which we do tracking,” he said. “The classifications that are there are what management has decided are relevant for management financial reporting purposes.”

McDermott believes the detail desired by the grass-roots movement would be too costly and unwieldy under the state’s current system of accounting.

“Transparency was not part of that picture 30 years ago. So we have what we have,” McDermott said.” We are presenting everything that we have that we think is appropriate to present.”

That’s not transparency, Cooke said.

“I think we need to educate the Governor and (other officials) on what transparency means. I would suggest that they study other transparency Web sites such as Missouri’s, Kansas’s or even Jefferson County’s Transparent Jeffco,’ Cooke said.

Menten suggested a direct approach to persuade the state to upgrade the site.

“There is a feedback button and we want people to flood that feedback button with ‘here’s what we want….’ And if our feedback isn’t addressed, we have other methods,” Menten said in a not-so-veiled reference to the continued transparency push at the legislature.

Menten, a Lakewood community activist, started a prototype Web site that transparency advocates often cite as an example of a simple, inexpensive searchable database of government spending.

The fledgling TOP site, dubbed Colorado’s “Transparency Online Project”, was created by an executive order signed by Gov. Bill Ritter last spring and went online last week, well ahead of the Jan. 1, 2010 deadline set by legislators in setting Ritter’s order as law.

Transparency advocates feared Ritter issued the executive order in an attempt to evade pending legislation that would have required a more comprehensive and complete look at how the state is spending taxpayers’ money, who is spending it and where the money goes.

But State Sen. Mike Kopp, R-Jeffco, and Rep. B.J. Nikkel, R-Dist. 49, pushed ahead with their legislation, the Colorado Taxpayer Transparency Act, to codify Ritter’s executive order, which otherwise could be withdrawn at any time by Ritter or a future governor. The legislation, HB 1288, initially was envisioned as the first step to putting all state expenses, revenues and contracts into an easily accessible, searchable database.

Opposition, largely from Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee, all but neutered the bill, requiring only the more vague compilation Ritter’s order required.

It groups fiscal year spending by department, lumping the details together in a “click through” data base that eventually leads the user from the department’s total budget to categories that in reveal little about who spent or, in many cases, who received the taxpayers’ money.

For instance, clicking on the Department of Local Government’s $236 million expenditure tab will reveal a number of listings, among them the $17 million “Local Government Permanent Fund”. Clicking on the total figure for the fund reveals the destination of the $17 million as “OT CS Dola Internal”.

That, critics say, is not enough detail, nor is it understandable.

Those concerns arose when the Senate Finance Committee considered the Transparency Act. During that session last spring, Dara Hessee, legislative liaison for the governor’s Office of Information Technology, said posting line item expenditures and accounting codes “could create a significant amount of confusion by users.”

Supporters of the bill countered that lack of detail and bureaucratic coding would create the confusion.

Also during that hearing, committee member Sen. Rollie Heath asked Kopp if the amended bill would answer public calls “for complete and total transparency.”

“I don’t know Sen. Heath. I think if you look at this as a bell curve, probably we catch most everybody,” said Kopp, who conceded that the bill falls short of what was envisioned by grassroots Transparency advocates.

Kopp called the bill a “first step toward accountability and transparency” when Ritter signed the bill. Both Kopp and Nikkel said they expect the data posted on the TOP site to become more complete and easier to understand as it develops over time.