Spotsylvania ranked 14th in government transparency based on website info

Well, what can one say?

I have read the TJI report. and Spotsy did rank 14th. However, as someone once said, the devil is in the details.

A perfect score was 100 points. No locality acheived that score.No locality achieved a score of 90 or even 81. The highest score was 80. Spotsy achieved a 55.5. When I went to school that 55.5 would have been a D or F. Not something to brag about.

Only two localities scored above 70. Only five scored above 60. 129 (96%) scored less than 60!

23 Virginia localities received a ZERO. A “goose egg.”

Remember, this ranking is for TRANSPARENCY. It is not a ranking for effectiveness or efficiency or any of the other things one might rank a locality. It is a ranking for how well you and I, ordinary citizens, can “see inside” our local government.

I guess the overall conclusion for me is; from a transparency standpoint, Virginia “sucks.” The TJI was kind, IMHO, when it concluded: “Localities in Virginia were generally dismal in their efforts at online financial transparency.”

What say you?

You know…I was thinking, always a dangerous situation, and I vaguely recall that at one of the BOS meetings someone, maybe Mr. Connors, mentioned Spotsy’s ranking at 14th. My recall was that it was a kind of passing comment and there was no discussion.

Well, my “thinking” was that now I understand the lack of “enthusiasm” I believe I detected on the BOS that night.

In any event there certainly is a lot of room for improvement.

I am not sure we have an “effective” local citizens group.

A better way to do this is open the closed doors and let the public into take a look at what local government is selling and wants us ti buy, sight unseen.

Here’s the URL to the original document

http://www.thomasjeffersoninst.org/pdf/articles/Govt_Transparency_LocalGov.pdf

You must be one of those oversight volunteer committee members the BOS let go a couple years back when the BOS wanted to, as Supv. Connors recently reflected that his “Reinvention Government Task Force will look for ways to STREAMLINE, CONSOLIDATE (make even smaller) our operations and PROCESSES and hopefully make som substantive CHANGES (beyond those made of the last 2 years) that help US (whoever that might be, but not constituents) do things better, CHEAPER and FASTER.”

Since it’s about to start raining in Supv. Connors world, I’ll put my umbrella and head for cover.

By the way, Larry prefers his prey to be compromised by politics. Shooting ducks in a barrel bring anything to mind?

When this issue begins to take better shape and WE can or allowed to see the trees for the forrest, maybe we’ll better appreciate the idea We deserve better than what we’re getting back from our elected leaders, their minnions and best friends. Until then, it’s one layer at a time. Any chance we could SPEED-UP that PROCESS?

@wiseman – point taken! BTW – Steve is a self-avowed Conservative Republican whose standard party shtick is a more open, more transparent and more accountable government.

That was at least part of the theme behind his alternate budget proposal – right and I did applaud it heartily.

But, I like to “encourage” Steve and company to do less idealogical things and more fiscal conservative things because as you point out we do need it and to be honest, it’s the part of the Republican Party now days that I miss the most.

I was dismayed also when the budget review committee was deep sixed. I will point out though that that committee could still function as an effective citizen committee doing just what Steve did.

That committee had a lot of expertise – hence the ability to read and understand much more about the budget than the average citizen.

But just FYI – from a political viewpoint – you cannot “work” for the county and at the same time criticize it unless you are an Ombudsman or similar.

What many BOS expect from citizen committees is constructive criticism not overt opposition – not in their position an alternative shadow government.

I truly don’t know what happened but my perception was that at some point, enough of the BOS perceived less than friendly actions … and decided to let them pursue that path as a more independent group.

That’s politics. I doubt very seriously that more than a handful of counties in the state have a serious ..truly independent citizens budget committee.

Steve Thomas proved that you can set up an alternative budget and he even got constructive feedback from the county so you don’t have to be an “official” county entity to accomplish useful things.

I’m not an apologist for less than wonderful actions by the county or the BOS …at times just somewhat pragmatic and somewhat understanding of human nature and politics.

I foe ONE am not buying what you’re trying to sell. Come to think of it, what are you trying to sell to the citizens of Spotsylvania County?

Well.. I didn’t find it THAT inflammatory… but yes some strong opinions on citizens committees and especially the budget committee.

I think a lot depends on an agreement and an expectation of what kinds of things a citizen committee would have as it’s framework and expected work product.

My view was that some on the budget committee clearly did not feel that their bosses were the BOS but almost considered themselves in an inspector general or ombudsman role to the point where they could operate in an adversarial manner and I do not think the BOS was comfortable with that kind of a committee.

How many counties in Va have budget citizen committees with that level of autonomy?

If there are some, then I’d like to see them … because this kind of a committee can be problematical if it turns into a political instrument.

Further, if people that are on the same team are not coordinated in their focus – it’s can actually result in a dysfunctional organization with too many voices.. 14 different people who are trying to pilot the boat.

I would have rather seen a continuing budget committee myself but it was obvious that some personalities had a much more adversarial operational focus in mind than the BOS was comfortable with.

I still think that THE one single Virginia Auditor Report that Mr. Logan got that compared how much Spotsylvania spent per-capita on schools compared to peer counties did more to help the BOS decide how much money to fund schools with than all of the fru fru about it that came from the budget committee on that issue.

The BOS actually has one more option if they want to use it and that is that Va Code allows the BOS to fund by specific category – like instruction, administration and maintenance and Stafford has begun doing this.

If not mistaken, we still have quite a few citizen committees STILL – right?

By the way, what contributions have the Sierra Club and the Committee of 500 (50) made toward bettering our quality of life in Spotsylvinia County? Maybe these are the last two standing Committee’s the BOS have left over from their exploration of single minded thinking.

DJ, Steve Thomas and myself are all on the same track with budget process (perhaps others as well).

I’d only point out (reasonably I hope) that activity-based accounting by itself won’t tell us much unless we know what to compare it to and consequently the ability to determine if we are paying too much or not.

I’d also like to point out an interesting part of the recommendations of the Gibson Study of Spotsylvania Schools – which was a bit of a shocker to me – that the schools were not spending ENOUGH money on a couple of functions.

And as most business folks know – not spending enough money on something – can lead to a loss of efficiency and harm to your business.

Of course the trick in that is to know.. and that’s the difference between those who really are in business and really do risk their personal (and family) assets and the rest of us blather-butts.

I am still confused as to the reasons the budget is not given line by line. Someone will have to explain that to me someday. I daresay with that one small innovation, we might take over first place on this list of dubious distinction!

Try cutting any budget, even the Federal one, without line by line numbers. The funny thing was, people would come back and say, “Oh, you can’t cut that. It has XYZ program in it”. How the heck would we have known?

There are some things the county does well by way of transparency, but the things they don’t do well are crippling. Makes me feel bad for the people who live in the lower counties on the list, like Westmoreland, who apparently does all their county business in an undisclosed underground bunker, where the minutes are burned afterwards.

re: “line by line” …. do ANY of the ranked counties do this?

I’m in favor of more granularity but would point out that the ultimate version of it would be an online checkbook – which apparently some of the top-rated counties do provide – but I have not availed myself of looking at the additional things that the top-rated counties do that Spotsy does not do

….. and in my mind could form a legitimate justification for advocating.. perhaps even a campaign issue.

… candidates that show me true interest in transparency and accountability AND keep the partisan horns under control are appealing

we just can’t seem to get the Goldilocks fiscally conservative candidate… a shame.

A local AD HOC Citizens group could also take this issue

goes back to how much time and effort each blather butt is actually willing to put in time on task to move the issue forward.

I did not get the impression that ya’ll were run out of town on a rail. Seems that you did get a response… and I would tend to agree with Barnes of targeting positions.

That’s not a good way to run a political campaign either if you ask me because I don’t think you really want a campaign that draws bull’s eyes on particular people.

The State Auditor of Public Accounts has some really excellent data on county taxes and spending and really does allow a pretty honest comparison on the costs of major county functions – on a per capita basis

The average per capita for the state for Planning and Community development is $92.11. Spotsylvania is $40.16.
Prince William is $97.64 Stafford – $48.47, Fairfax is $168.31, Henrico – $102.39.

Now that does not tell me that Spotsylvania might not be able to find additional efficiencies but it does tell me that they are not one of the state’s worst examples either.

Your budget recommendations also struck me as a bit arbitrary where it appears that you assumed that the county operations were not very efficient but did not arrive at the same conclusion for law enforcement and schools.

Just FYI – Spotsylvania is in the top 10 in Va in education costs per capita.

We are higher than places like Henrico and Chesterfield.

The State Auditor locality comparison report is at:

www[dot]apa.state.va.us/data/download/local_government/comparative_cost/Amended%20Cost%2009.xls

You’ll need EXCEL .. it’s a big spreadsheet but it’s chock full of information related to revenues and expenditures and fertile ground (IMHO) for identifying POTENTIAL Areas where our county tends to spend more than other counties for similar functions.

Here’s the categories on that file:

Exhibit A General Government
Exhibit B Local Revenue
Exhibit B-1 Inter-Governmental Revenue
Exhibit B-2 Other Local Taxes
Exhibit C Summary of Maintenance and Operation Expenditures
Exhibit C-1 General Government Administration Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-2 Judicial Administration Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-3 Public Safety Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-4 Public Works Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-5 Health and Welfare Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-6 Education Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-7 Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit C-8 Community Development Expenditures by Activity
Exhibit D Activity Expenditures by Object Class
Exhibit E Capital Projects for General Government
Exhibit F Debt Service for General Government
Exhibit G Summary of Outstanding Debt
Exhibit H Summary of Enterprise Activities
Exhibit I Demographic and Tax Data

Larry (and Marty),

My “run out of town on a rail” line was a reference to me run for Supe last year, not the budget discussion of this past spring. Guess I was too clever by half on that one.

As for the data, most of it is no better than what the county presented to the public. The rest doesn’t provide nearly the detail required. By acticity-based-cost, I mean *within* departments and bureaus, not across them (as some of the later sheet show). PW and Fairfax, while not perfect, are closer to what I think we need down here in terms of budget info.