South Carolina's Local Transparency Efforts Not Popular With Some Officials

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 1:48 PM by Mattie Duppler

Despite the slew of transparency successes we have had this year, the battle to keep taxpayers in the dark about how their money is spent is still being waged by local officials in South Carolina. State Controller Richard Eckstrom has been instrumental in getting the state’s finances online for South Carolinians to view, but his push to get localities to do the same is being met by opposition in the towns of Mauldin, Simpsonville and Fountain Inn.

Officials in these towns have provided reasoning that require some imagination – from complaining that posting spending information online is “too much work” to the especially egregious claim that it would “confuse people.” In a twist of logical reasoning that could only be proposed by a government official, public leaders are claiming that without contextual information spending data is useless to the public and thus posting spending information online is unnecessarily complicated.

Of course, simply providing information on an expenditure would preclude this “confusion” that is so troubling to town officials, but that seems to be an effort too difficult for these town officials to make.

What’s especially problematic is that while these town leaders have been crying ‘unfunded mandate’ by the state, we have shown multiple times that disclosing spending information is often less costly than predicted and usually ends up saving money in the long run – a benefit South Carolina has already experienced at the state level. Such vapid arguments against transparency beg the question…what do these local towns have to hide?

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