Colorado Spending Transparency

NBA star Scottie Pippen made more than $18 million in 2002. But you may not know that he also was a farmer! He was so good at cultivating the earth that the federal government paid him more than $130,000 over a five-year time period to not grow anything on his farm.

According to a 2002 Heritage Foundation article, Uncle Sam paid other celebrities not to produce as well:

including Sam Donaldson of ABC News, CNN founder Ted Turner, and David Rockefeller, former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr. Even former Washington Post Managing Editor Ben Bradlee received federal money under the program a couple of years ago.

The same article also reported that none of this information would be made public without the Environmental Working Group, which has worked to expose billions of taxpayer dollars “lavished” on some of the wealthiest agricultural operation. In 2002 then Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) tried:

valiantly before the Christmas break to gain passage of a farm bill approved by the Senate Agriculture Committee that included an obscure measure originally authored by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
Daschle failed, but the measure — which would exempt huge amounts of information from disclosure under the FOIA — is far from dead. Small wonder: It would allow government bureaucrats to keep such potentially inconvenient facts as Pippen’s tax-paid bounty out of public view.

While Daschle failed in 2002, Congress did not in 2008. The public will no longer see who is getting huge agricultural subsidies. Mark Tapscott, author of the Heritage Foundation article, wrote in a recent Washington Examiner editorial:

Well, you can forget about updating that story any time soon because USDA is no longer updating the database. Seems that the Democratic Congress in 2008 changed the law that previously required the department to maintain the database to say that doing so was merely optional.

The federal farm bureaucrats naturally opted out of disclosing how much they were paying people like former ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson and multi-millionaire David Rockefeller not to grow crops. No doubt the decision was made to “save tax dollars.”

According to EWG, the United States Department of Agriculture did receive millions of taxpayer dollars from the stimulus to upgrade its computers but not to continue providing the public with information about who in Beverly Hills receives farm subsidies.

Once again, the Obama administration’s promise of transparency rings hollow.  The Kansas City Star opined:

in the last farm bill from 2008, Congress slipped in language that makes it tougher to follow the money trail.

The problem with transparency is, well, the transparency.

Mothers Against Debt (MAD), a new project from Transparency Czarina Amy Oliver Cooke, just release a video that illustrates the reality of what our national debt is doing to our children. At COST we like promote our motto: No taxation without information.  Perhaps our children should promote the original motto: No taxation without representation. After watching the video, you’ll see why they have reason to do so.

The White House press corps finally gets the joke…and now knows that it is on them.

In a story about why reporters are unhappy with the Obama administration, Politico writes: [Robert] Gibbs said at one of his briefings, “This is the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”

Peals of laughter broke out in the briefing room.

Apparently not.

The most transparent White House ever?

Nope.

Recently the White House press corp met with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to air “grievances” about lack of access to President Obama.

And yesterday, Politico reported:

Police chased reporters away from the White House and closed Lafayette Park today in response to a gay rights protest in which several service members in full uniform handcuffed themselves to the White House gate to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

People who have covered the White House for years tell me that’s an extremely unusual thing to do in an area that regularly features protests.

A reporter can be seen in the YouTube video above calling the move “outrageous” and “ridiculous.”

Maybe the press shouldn’t have been so enamored with him in the first place.

Another aspect of transparency allows the public enough time to review and comment on legislation.  Both Governor Bill Ritter and President Barack Obama show the same lack of respect for those paying the bills.  We don’t even get to review the bills that affect our lives and wallets.

Candidate Obama promised that the public would be given five days to review and comment on any legislation before he signed it into law.  Cato has documented how President Obama repeatedly has broken the hearts of transparency advocates. 

That same habit of rushing a bill through the legislature is happening here in Colorado.  Whether you agree with SB10-36, the “teacher tracking bill,” or not, the public should be given more than 48 hoursto read, review and comment on legislation before it is signed by the Governor Ritter or any other governor for that matter. 

This is especially true since SB 36 was passed with the “Safety Clause,” which says: “The general assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety.”  In other words, the legislature has decided the public cannot challenge the bill.  This is a classic example of safety clause abuse so common in the Colorado General Assembly but taken to a new level since the public wasn’t given time to review and comment.

Our transparency Czarina Amy Oliver Cooke is a mom so we hear lots of parenting stories.  Right now, President Barack Obama looks like the over promising parent who constantly under delivers.  While American voters are like the kids who aren’t buying the falsehoods and simply roll their eyes every time Barack Obama utters the word “transparency.”

According to Breitbart TV, Obama has made no fewer than eight promises for transparency in health care reform negotiations.  Those promises ring hollow.  Politico reports:

President Barack Obama and congressional Democratic leaders agreed Tuesday to forgo a formal conference committee for reconciling the Senate and House health care bills, according to three Democratic congressional aides.

The decision means that the White House, Senate Majority Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will attempt to reach an agreement through private negotiations with key lawmakers.

No C-SPAN. No TV cameras. No internet streaming. No opposition party. Once again…No transparency.

Let’s face it; we can put a man on the moon, bring down the evil empire, and cure diseases, but we cannot track $787 billion of taxpayer money.   

Denver Post reporter Miles Moffeit reports that “despite federal lawmakers’ pledge of transparency, the final stages of most money trails, along with key information about job impacts, will remain invisible to users of the Recovery.org website when it debuts next month.”

Things we won’t see on the federal Web site:

• Payments to grassroots-level recipients and their identities, such as subcontractors, the subcontractors’ own vendors and individuals.

For example, the U.S. Justice Department sent a criminal-justice grant to the state of Colorado, which in turn awarded $75,662 to the city of Denver, which in turn will contract with a nonprofit called Project PAVE to carry out the work. Under existing rules, only the payment passing to the state and to Denver, along with the identity of Project PAVE, must be reported.

The sum paid to Project PAVE and subsequent dollars passed along to other vendors or employees, along with their identities, will not be posted.

• Stimulus expenditures under $25,000.

If the state Department of Transportation were to award $24,999 to an engineer to help oversee a project, the identity of the engineer as well as the specific sum do not have to be publicly reported.

• Costs borne by nonfederal agencies in administering stimulus dollars.

Gov. Bill Ritter’s controversial $40,000 payment to his former law firm to help advise the state’s stimulus-oversight board does not have to be posted on the website because the Recovery Act doesn’t require reporting of administration costs. Those expenses include consultant fees, according to the governor’s office.

• Details about jobs generated and preserved, including performance data.

Agencies must use a formula to calculate “full-time equivalents” created, but school officials, for example, would not be required to detail whether those are teachers’ jobs. The public also won’t be able to determine from the website whether those FTEs bring insurance benefits.

Taxpayers can find some Colorado specific information on the state’s recovery Web site.  But if concerned taxpayers are looking for detailed expenditure information, they will be disappointed.  Most of the information is aggregated.

COST praised candidate Obama for his commitment to transparency, but as a president he has failed miserably.  If the 1200 page Waxman-Markey global warming bill passes through Congress and the president signs it, he will once again break his pledge to be the most transparent administration.  The legislation, which the Wall Street Journal calls the largest tax increase in history, is being pushed through at lightning speed.  Introduced this week, Speaker Pelosi wants a vote right now.

Republicans are right to call Democrats on breaking their pledge to be more transparent.  Politico writes:

Republicans say Democrats are ramming their climate-change legislation through the House without enough time for members to read the bill — let alone to understand it — all in violation of their promises about creating a more transparent legislative process.

Furthermore, 300 of the 1200 pages were added late last night.  How could any legislator read, let alone understand, the impact of this massive legislation in such a short period of time?  The answer is they couldn’t; yet they are willing to increase the tax burden on American working families.

So much for transparency.  This is a prime example of taxation without even knowing the information!

UPDATE: The House just passed 219-212.  Reports say not one House member read the bill.

Candidate Barack Obama on Transparency:

Whether you believe Government ought to spend more or spend less or just spend differently, we all should be able to agree that Government spending should be transparent and that public information ought to be accessible to the public.

Following his Big Apple date night with First Lady Michelle Obama, the New York Post reports, “The White House declined to say how much the trip was costing taxpayers.”

COST believes that tranpsarency is more than just online databases of government expenditures and revenues.  It’s about good government — transparent, accountable and completely open.  That’s why we were so disappointed to read about SB 297, which allows state agencies to circumvent standard competitve bidding practices for “high dollar projects” if agencies feel they may be in danger of missing federal stimulus deadlines. 

Legislators put a price on good goverment in Colorado.

Troubling to COST is how this bill passed with no public input. According to the Denver Post, the bill sponsored by Democrat Senator Paula Sandoval and Democrat Representative Joel Judd, “zipped through the House and Senate with no public scrutiny despite concerns from financial watchdogs inside state government that it could become the rule instead of the exception.”

Furthermore the legislation passed both the House and the Senate over objections from state officials.

[S]tate procurement officials aired strong concerns about waiving such standards, fearing they could lead to bad precedent and widespread circumvention of rules, according to two people with knowledge of the debates who are not authorized to speak to the media. Managers in that division did not return phone calls from The Post.

The Post also reports that Governor Bill Ritter had a hand in crafting the legislation, but Mark Cavanaugh, director of the governor’s economic-recovery team said,  ”the idea here was not to have a way to get around (state law), but in those situations where our back is up against the wall, we’d have an option.” In other words, state agencies need to have a way around the law.

In Colorado good government is available to the highest non competitive bid using federal stimulus dollars, also known as your tax dollars.