Transparency is still an issue at the state capitol. Early in this 2012 legislative session, three bills could provide taxpayers with additional transparency in government.

HB12-1009 Federal Funds Transparency Act

House Sponsors: Cheri Gerou (R-HD 25)

Senate Sponsors: Kent Lambert (R-SD 9 )

This bill seeks additional information than is currently provided on how each department and agency of the executive branch spends federal tax dollars. Most importantly, the agency or department must provide “plans for operating the state agency if there is a reduction” in federal funding of five percent or more.

This is a common sense bill that forces state agencies that rely heavily upon the federal government such as the Governor’s Energy Office (GEO), Education Department, and Department of Health Care Policy and Financing to address possible future austerity measures. For the GEO, which received and spent hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars with little accountability, the time for planning for life after stimulus money is now.

Prediction: This bill will pass the House. It should pass the Senate but won’t. The excuse will be that it is too much to ask of overworked state employees.

HB12-1118 School Collective Bargaining Open to Public

House Sponsors: Kathleen Conti (R-HD 38)

Senate Sponsors: None

This bill declares that collective bargaining negotiations between boards of education or school administration personnel and union representatives are part of the people’s business and thus must be open to the public.

In addition, the terms of the written collective bargaining agreement must be made available for public inspection.

This issue erupted last spring as my colleague Ben DeGrow explained in his April 2011 opinion editorial:

The collective bargaining agreement that gives the Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA) exclusive representation more than 5,000 district teachers plainly sets transparency as the default setting: “Negotiations shall be conducted in open sessions, unless both parties agree to the contrary.”

Nevertheless, the language is hollow. In recent years, while negotiations were supposed to be open, finding any information of times and locations on district outlets has been next to impossible.

This year it has become even worse. On April 11 at a joint appearance, JCEA president Kerrie Dallman and Jeffco superintendent Cynthia Stevenson publicly concurred that all negotiations had been closed.

Conti is not out of line for requiring this kind of transparency. “Six other states have enacted laws ensuring public access to negotiations between government agencies and employee unions,” writes DeGrow. While…”Colorado leaves it up to local discretion. Only one of 42 school districts that practice union bargaining, Poudre R-1 in Fort Collins, thoroughly ensures citizens’ right to observe negotiations. Poudre officials have observed “no negative effects” from the practice.”

Prediction: This bill passes through the House but union lobby in the Senate lead by Evie Hudak will make sure it dies in committee.

SB12-084 PERA Transparency

Senate Sponsor: Kent Lambert (R-SD 9)

House Sponsor: Spencer Swalm (R-HD 37)

This bill requires transparency for Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) members and retirees “who have ever been elected officials or cabinet-level appointees of elected officials.” Data elements to include:

• Person’s name
• Each position held
• Amount of any annual salary paid for each position
• Amount of employer and employee contributions paid on such salary
• Age of retirement
• Highest average salary
• Amount of benefits paid

When State Treasurer Walker Stapleton, a statutory member of the PERA board, has to sue to get information regarding benefits paid and plan solvency, taxpayers realize they are past due for PERA transparency.

Prediction: The state employees union and PERA lobby will kill this bill in the Senate. Too bad.

Check the Transparency blog for updates. We’ll track the legislation so you don’t have to.

The column below appeared originally in the Summit Daily on December 22, 2011.

Colorado’s all-payer database poses serious risk, little gain

By Amy Oliver Cooke and Linda Gorman

Colorado state government, and local foundations and health policy elites, have become so ideologically invested in failed health reform policies that they now see nothing wrong with forcing Colorado citizens to give their medical records to a centralized repository, free from scrutiny by state auditors, open records requests and open meeting requirements.

In 2010, state lawmakers passed HB 1330, which created the All-Payer Claim Database. It was an exceedingly vague piece of legislation. It created the usual sycophantic advisory committee to give an illusion of public control, but the real power was given to an “Administrator” empowered to collect whatever medical data it wished from every “payer” in the state. The Administrator may impose unspecified fines on payers who refuse to comply. The database was to be operational only if private funding could be found. With funding already in place from private sources intent on promoting government-controlled health care, the Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) was appointed as the Administrator for the database. CIVHC promptly converted itself from an entity subject to public oversight to a private 501(c)3 nonprofit.

CIVHC supporters claim the database will be secure, that individual identities will be protected by encrypted Social Security numbers, and that individual privacy is protected by HIPAA.

These claims are disingenuous at best. Encrypted Social Security numbers do not protect individual identities in a database that also contains information on an individual’s gender, address, race, spouse, children, dependents, insurance group, insurance contract and member number, and the doctor, place of treatment, time of treatment, diagnosis, place of care, prescription drugs, and payments for all medical treatments for everyone covered under any insurance policy or making a cash payment.

Centralized electronic medical records have been maintained by Britain’s National Health Service for almost a decade with predictable and disastrous results. In April 2010, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that private detectives were selling top-secret patient information for up to £300 a pop. This means that if you or your spouse or children have ever seen someone for psychiatric care, an abortion, a sexually transmitted disease, or substance abuse, anyone with access to the database will be able to figure out who you are and use that information against you. Alternatively, you could be wrongly diagnosed as an alcoholic or a sexual abuser, have the diagnosis entered in your record, and be threatened by a blackmailer.

Good luck proving a negative.

CIVHC supporters say the All-Payer Database is essential because they cannot “manage what they cannot measure.” Never mind that people who pay for their own health care are perfectly competent to manage it themselves or hire others to do so, or that CIVHC’s form of centralized management has failed everywhere it has been tried. Claims that the database will improve medical care are nonsense because it does not collect the detailed physiographic information required by clinical studies that do. What it will do is add substantially to medical care costs.

All existing public information suggests that CIVHC plans to use the All-Payer Database to bring private medical care under the control of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. Its metrics emphasize imposing price controls on insurers, and physicians, targeting people who are obese, limiting physician freedom to recommend treatments, making sure that individuals have “advance directives” in place, monitoring the amount spent on the last six months of life, and limiting Colorado health spending to a fixed percentage of the state’s gross state product.

As it is cheaper to let people die than treat them, it is but a short step from this to copying the European tradition of letting underweight babies die, forcing the elderly to accept palliative care, and denying advanced care to the disabled and seriously ill.

Amy Oliver Cooke directs the Colorado Transparency Project (COST) at the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Colorado. Linda Gorman is director of the Independence Institute’s Health Care Policy Center.

Colorado State Treasurer Walker Stapleton, a rare voice of reason on Colorado’s Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) Board of Trustees, told News Talk 1310 KFKA talk show host Amy Oliver in a recent interview that when the Board voted to maintain an unrealistic 8 percent rate of return one Board member provided the following reason, ”We can’t lower the rate of return because then we would have to explain why SB 1 didn’t solve the problem.”

The unnamed Board member referred to Senate Bill 1 passed in 2010 with support for the PERA Board of Trustees, which was supposed to bring PERA back to solvency.

Oh, the horror of admitting a mistake! Surely wounded pride is much worse than continuing PERA’s unrealistic expectations on the rate of return, which will leave taxpayers and PERA members on the hook for a massive shortfall anywhere from $21 billion to $35 billion.

Certainly it’s better to ignore industry experts and save face in the present than face the reality of PERA’s insolvency.

In a Denver Post guest editorial last spring, Stapleton courageously exposed the “hard truth” of PERA’s future if we continue with current policy:

PERA is not structurally sound, and Coloradans are on the hook should the system fail. Although the stock market recouped some of its sharp losses in 2010 and Senate Bill 1 made incremental improvements last year, PERA still maintains an unfunded liability of close to $25 billion, which is the measure of what it owes compared to its assets.

If this current and growing gap is not addressed, which Forbes magazine estimates at $15,000 for every Colorado taxpayer, the people of Colorado are ultimately responsible for funding this massive shortfall.

Just add that $15,000 to our current unfunded federal liabilities, which is somewhere north of $1,000,000 per taxpayer.

The eight members of the PERA Board (five voted against maintaining the 8 percent rate of return) aren’t the only ones unwilling to face reality. State Representative Sal Pace (D-Pueblo), now looking to challenge Congressman Scott Tipton in the 3rd CD, did vote against SB 1 but only because he doesn’t think PERA has a solvency problem. The Pueblo Chieftain quoted from Pace’s Web site in February 2010:

‘I voted against the proposal because I don’t believe that the problems with PERA need an immediate fix and the solutions proposed unduly placed a burden on our seniors,’ Pace said in a statement on his Web site Tuesday.

Pace noted the high concentration of PERA enrollees in Pueblo and said projections that PERA would be insolvent within 20 years don’t take into account the possibility that the slumping economy will rebound, and that a target date for solvency of 50-60 years from now (which before SB1 had been the goal) ‘would be less onerous and more fair.’

The “possibility that the slumping economy will rebound”? I keep that “possibility” right next to my unicorn feed.

Stryker Corporation announced it “will cut 5% of its global workforce by the end of next year to reduce costs in the face of new fees on device makers required by the U.S. health care law,” reports the Detroit Free Press. According to Stryker, “job cuts will reduce annual pretax operating costs by more than $100 million beginning in 2013, when the medical-device excise tax is scheduled to take effect.”

Stryker was founded by Dr. Homer Stryker, a Michigan orthopedic surgeon, to improve the quality of health care for his patients. Ironically, two of grandchildren Jon and Pat Stryker have donated millions to democrat candidates and leftist causes that support Obamacare — the very law cited above which destroys the health care their grandfather advanced and kills jobs. Yet, the siblings are often called “philanthropists” and even list themselves as such for political contributions. Stryker employees won’t think the siblings very charitable considering the their political contributions have led to workers’ job losses.

But workers are the little people.

Jon Stryker, worth $1.1 billion and number 375 on the list of Forbes 400 richest Americans, has donated $2,658,193 to democrats candidates, including Barack Obama and Charles Schumer, political action committees, 527s, and democrat party funds between 1999 and 2012 election cycle based on a search on Open Secrets.

Forbes lists Pat Stryker, one of the infamous “gang of four,” at number 331 worth $1.3 billion. Maybe granddad Stryker liked Pat better than Jon, or sister Ronda best of all.  At number 171, Ronda Stryker is worth $2.3 billion, but doesn’t donate much politically according to Open Secrets. Sister Pat, on the other hand, has donated $2,979,292 to democrats such as Barack Obama and one-term Congresswoman Betsy Markey and their leftist causes between 1999 and 2012 election cycle.

Both Jon and Pat are routinely in the top 15 donors to 527s. Maybe Jon and Pat can set up a fund for the Stryker employees their political donations helped to displace.

Want to know the answer to that question? Then read the new report from the Independence Institute Education Policy Center titled Time to Show the Money.

Co-authors research associate Devan Crean and senior policy analyst Ben DeGrow reviewed 178 K-12 school districts, 16 BOCES, and the Charter School Institute to determine if they were compliant with 2010 Public School Financial Transparency Act.

Crean and DeGrow’s research found “only 24 of the state’s 195 school districts and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) fulfill all of the Public School Financial Transparency Act’s requirements to post budgets, audits, financial statements and expenditures online.” Most of those are the state’s larger districts.

Hear DeGrow go into more detail about K-12 transparency during his interview on the Amy Oliver Show on News Talk 1310 KFKA. He also provides insight into the state’s election results and what they mean for K-12. If you want to know how your local district fared, find out by reading the paper. If they didn’t do well, then ask your district to show you the money!

Taxpayers across the country should thank Colorado State Representative Cindy Acree for her persistence and determination to hold Colorado’s Governor’s Energy Office (GEO) accountable. At the end of last week, she went public with her demand for a full blown audit, including performance and financial, of the “off-budget” agency that has been awash in federal stimulus money over the last three years.

The questionable spending certainly is the big story, so big in fact that Rep Acree has asked Colorado’s congressional delegation to launch a federal investigation because much of the agency’s money is federal. We documented that spending in our report titled “Governor’s Energy Office Needs a Dose of Sunshine.”

The secondary story is the GEO’s arrogance and crony philanthropy.

More than a year ago, Rep Acree began asking the GEO for financial information that is public record. Unwilling to give an elected state legislator the information, Rep. Acree had to submit a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request. She ended up with hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of indecipherable lines of individual expenditures, which were not what she asked for but all the GEO would supply. Remember, this is an elected official. If she has this much difficulty getting the information, imagine how the GEO would treat the average taxpayer?

Without the time and manpower to make sense of the information, Rep Acree contacted the Independence Institute to see if we could provide another set of eyes to examine the information. It was not a task for the faint of heart as intern Kyle Huwa explained the methodology of our research in his paper:

The Independence Institute acquired the expenditures of the Governor’s Energy Office from August 2006 to November 2010 and sorted them in a two-inch binder. Just the data starting from January 2008 contained more than 18,000 individual entries on 292 pages. Because the GEO produced the data in hard copy form and with no categorizations based on expenditure purpose, the researcher had to scan all 292 pages, convert them to text, and then double-check every amount for accuracy (the text conversion was not always accurate). Due to the sheer quantity of the data, there may be minor textual errors in the online database, but all of the dollar amounts have been manually checked. The researcher then marked a category for each expenditure and wrote a computer program to process all 18,000 lines and place them into created categories.

Six months after getting the information from Rep. Acree and hundreds of man hours later, we finished our report. A few of the questionable expenditures we found:

• Expenditures that could not be identified and GEO did not clarify: $9,021,060.23
• Expenditures on cell phones: $51,629.22
• Expenditures on travel: $455,656.06

Since then we have found more questionable spending including a six figure donation to the Denver Zoo so it can be the “greenest zoo” in the country and payments to lobbyists. At the end of our report, we recommend a full audit of the GEO.

CBS Denver Channel 4 broke the story about Rep Acree’s call for a full audit. Reporter Shaun Boyd also contacted former head of the GEO Tom Plant regarding Rep. Acree’s investigation and request for an audit. His response reflects the arrogance of an agency that is not accustom to answering questions.  He told CBS 4 that the GEO’s budget is complicated with funding from several sources so it would be “difficult for an outsider” to understand.

Channel 4 tried to reach former Governor Bill Ritter for his response, since this spending occurred during his administration. He was unavailable.

What Plant should be answering is why a sitting lawmaker would have to submit a CORA request just to get basic financial information, and why under his watch the GEO spent more than $9 million (over 7,000 individual line item expenditures) with no vendor information and sometimes no description or just an indecipherable alpha-numeric code.

Also, under Plant’s tenure, the GEO appears guilty of crony philanthropy as reported in our paper:

Also notable is the total of $77,434.05 paid to the Boulder Energy Conservation Center (BECC), a non-profit for which former GEO Director Tom Plant served as executive director when he was in the Colorado state legislature. BECC since has changed its name to the Center for Resource Conservation (CRC). Other GEO funds have been directed to organizations to which CRC board members have had connections. Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, where CRC Vice President Mark Ruzzin once worked, received $222,162.29 from the GEO. Another $22,000 went to the Colorado Brownfields Foundation, on which CRC Secretary Polly Jessen once served.

Score one for cupcakes! Bake sale beats the establishment!

Nancy Rumfelt, the one woman army at Liberty Watch, who had to have a “Bake Sale for Transparency” to raise money to pay for an open records request, defeated the education establishment. On Tuesday voters in the Thompson School District in Loveland voted overwhelmingly “no” on a $154 million property tax increase. The final tally showed nearly 61 percent of voters rejected ballot measure 3A.

Newly elected school board member Bob Kerrigan told the Loveland Reporter Herald that a lack of transparency hurt the school district’s image:

Another negative perception regarded the district’s level of transparency, Kerrigan said. “It’s accountability. It’s where the money is going,” he said. “I known we do great things here, but right now the public perception is we struggle.”

Kerrigan, who defeated incumbent school board member and 3A supporter Karen Stockley, opposed the tax increase and even attended Rumfelt’s bake sale.

Government, especially school districts, should take notice that a lack of transparency can kill a tax increase. It happened in Greeley Evans District 6 in 2009.

Senator Rollie Heath was the chair of the ”Unimaginative Failure” Commission (a.k.a. Long Term Fiscal Stability Commission) on which I sat in 2009. Heath constantly asked “what kind of Colorado do we want?” As if a chosen few have the right to force an answer for more than five million people, but that did not stop Sen. Heath from his constant advocacy for the bigger government he assumed Coloradans wanted.

Well, tonight Colorado answered Sen. Heath’s question loud and clear.  The resounding defeat (just minutes after the polls closed) of Heath’s Proposition 103, an immoral income and sales tax increase supposedly “for the children,” should tell the Senator and all other big government advocates what kind of government Coloradans want. Nearly 64 percent of voters statewide put the kibosh on more money for government.

Two key points. First, Heath actually showed restraint with Prop 103 because it was supposed to raise a $2.9 billion over 5 years. That sounds like a lot to reasonable people, but Heath would have liked more than $9 billion annually to massively expand government in all areas. Thus even a modest proposal from Heath’s perspective was met with a HELL NO! answer.

Second, Prop 103 was the “most high-profile statewide tax measure” in the country, and “the outcome is likely to be viewed as a barometer of attitudes toward the tough fiscal choices states have ahead,” according to Stateline.  Senator Heath even said that tonight’s results for Prop 103 “‘will be very telling to the rest of the country about how people are feeling.’” If Heath is right, there is no confusion in the message that Coloradans sent. No new taxes and no “for the children” BS.

Did you get a thank note from the Denver Zoo for your donation? You should have because Colorado taxpayers, and likely taxpayers from across the country,”donated” above and beyond the amount that the seven county, Denver Metro area taxpayers approved with their yes vote to fund the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD).

In 2008, the Governor’s Energy Office agreed to “donate” $100,000 “to support research and development of the zoo’s biomass gasification system planned to heat and power portions of the zoo’s next major exhibit, Asian Tropics.” We found two payments from the GEO to the Zoological Foundation totaling close to that six figure sum in our spreadsheet for GEO miscellaneous expenditures and on the Transparency Online Project. The GEO is funded with taxpayer money from both the state and federal government.

Perhaps you can feel good about your “donation” because the goal of the Denver Zoo is to be the “greenest zoo in the world.”

The GEO isn’t the only state agency donating. A search of Colorado’s transparency database TOPs shows the following state payments to the Denver Zoo:

2009

• Division of Wildlife gave the Denver Zoo a $260,000 grant
• Department of Human Services spent $3,992.34 on “official functions” and “other purchased services.”
• Department of Public Health and Environment spent $1,000 on “official functions.”

A local property tax increase in Loveland has attracted all the usual supporters including the teachers union, administration, and other status quo educational-industrial complex advocates. They have an issue committee, volunteers, money (including contributions from the Colorado Education Association and top district administrators), and access to the local newspaper’s guest editorial page, which the opposition does not.

3A is a $154 million property tax increase for the Thompson School District, which we detailed in an earlier post. We also reported on Nancy Rumfelt’s Bake Sale for Transparency, which raised money so she could pay to get copies of public documents. Mrs. Rumfelt’s Liberty Watch, a 501c4 nonprofit, assumed the responsibility of challenging and providing an alternative perspective to the Yes on 3A crowd, a.k.a. Community Coalition for Local Schools, the issue committee formed in August 2011 to champion the tax increase.

As the only organized opposition to the tax increase, Mrs. Rumfelt penned a guest editorial for the Loveland Reporter Herald. The newspaper, which also opposes the tax increase, declined to run her column because she and Liberty Watch are not registered as an issue committee with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office.  There seems to be a double standard as Mrs. Rumfelt explains in a recent blog post:

Last night (Oct. 19th) around 6pm I received an email from Jeff [Stahla, City Editor] notifying me that because we did not file as an issue committe the Reporter Herald will not print my guest column.  The rationale provided is that Liberty Watch has a stake in this issue and is no different than the Thompson Education Assoc. (TEA) or the Coloradoa Education Assoc. (CEA).

I strongly disagree!!

The school district, the teachers and most important the union all will benefit financially from an additional $12.8 million EVERY year being taken from citizens and redistributed to teachers, district staff and who knows what else.

The financial report filed by CCLS (3A issue committee) shows that 57% of the transactions come from Thompson District Employees or family members and equal 42% of the dollars contributed.  The teachers union transactions represent 5% and contributed 20% of the total dollars raised.  The balance came from board of education members (former and current), businesses and individuals.

What is apparent is that CCLS may have filed to be a legitimate issue committee but in no way legitmately represents the citizens of Loveland and the true “stakeholders” of 3A are the Thompson District Staff and teachers union.

Here is the link to the guest column I submitted and I would encourage you all to forward the column to others and also the link to this article since none of this will ever be printed with a drop of ink from the Reporter Herald.

For me it seems like a catch 22 argument as Liberty Watch has followed the rules that the Secretary of State has issued in an effort to make it easier for citizens and/or true grassroots groups to have a voice in the political process.

The Reporter Herald however, has decided that they are the final authority and will overrule the Secretary of State Scott Gessler in his decision to ensure citizens true representation and free speech.

COST agrees with Nancy Rumfelt. The Reporter Herald’s rationale is rather lame. Amazing that a grassroots organization, which already had organize a bake sale to raise money just to get documents that are a matter of public record, can’t get a guest editorial published in a local newspaper because of status with the SoS. Access seems much easier if part of the establishment.