Opaque Transparency

Colorado’s state treasurer, Cary Kennedy, is on the hot seat. When running for office, she promised to make the state’s spending more transparent. She has not followed through.

In a different age, such dilatoriness might have been overlooked. Today, the very medium that makes it easy to report what is happening with taxpayers’ money, the Internet, also makes it easy to pressure delinquent officials.

There are websites. The one calling Kennedy to account is a blog called Colorado Spending Transparency. Or COST.

COST recalls that during his 2006 campaign for Colorado State Treasurer, Kennedy observed that when you buy groceries, the receipt shows what you bought. Kennedy, too, she said, would “show you where your money goes.”

Colorado does post its annual budget online. But the COST blog wants a detailed, searchable database, as fifteen other states have provided.

Representative Don Marostica, who also championed transparency in his 2006 campaign, introduced a bill to require such online itemizing. The bill never made it out of committee. Marostica had planned to re-​introduce the bill until Governor Ritter stated in a recent speech that he would work with Treasurer Kennedy and others to put the state’s checkbook online.

COST says doing this will only reveal what the state paid, not necessarily what it paid for. COST wants the whole story. And will keep pressing until it gets it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.