Monday evening in New Haven, Connecticut State Comptroller candidate Kevin Lembo sat down with a group of bloggers to discuss his campaign. Different topics interest different bloggers. Some lean more toward activism, others towards journalism, and often they end up somewhere in the middle, so the discussion was fairly broad based.

Many of the bloggers were already well acquainted with Mr. Lembo from his early explorations into running for Lt. Governor and from the Democratic Convention and Primary. War stories and strategy was discussed. Yet the real meat of the discussion came around Kevin Lembo’s vision for the Comptrollers office.

In many ways, the Comptrollers job is pretty nonpartisan. The goals of a good comptroller, no matter what party they are from should be transparency and efficiency, and Mr. Lembo spoke well about both of these topics.

For transparency, he spoke about the State Comptroller’s Bond Allocation Database. It is a useful tool that is probably not well enough known. Mr. Lembo spoke about it being a good start, but that his vision was to ultimately put the whole budget up by agency, by line item and update it regularly as money is spent for the budget items.

As a longer term goal, Mr Lembo hopes to see some of the award winning work of the State Legislature on Results Based Accountability incorporated into an online website for the Comptroller’s office.

He hopes that this will be a valuable tool for people to compare budgets and results across states. Such comparisons and further research has the potential to considerably improve government efficiency beyond the simple efficiencies achieved by making spending more transparent.

When asked about other states, he said that the comparisons would need to be done on a case by case basis. He did speak highly of the work to promote transparency that Susan Coombs, the Republican Comptroller of the State of Texas has done on their Window on State Government.

Some state government spending data is already online here in Connecticut through the Yankee Institute’s CT Sunlight Project. He lauded the project yet he thought this project should have been done by the state, and expressed concern about protecting the security and safety of some people listed in the CT Sunlight Project page.

Another key area for improved government efficiency is in health care purchasing. It is a large part of state and local budgets. By consolidating health care purchasing, even starting simply by bringing in DSS and corrections, Mr. Lembo believes significant savings can be realized. Ideally, he would like to see such savings be used to further expand health care offerings to the uninsured and to small businesses. As a large purchaser of health care, the state can also push for more efficient and better health care.

There were other areas where Mr. Lembo believes that the state can improve efficiency in delivering vital services. This could involve combining agencies to work more effectively together as well as reviewing previous spending records to see where budgets could be adjusted.

The wide ranging and frank discussion focused on the issues our state faces should serve as an example for others seeking office.