Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground

Underlying the debate about deficit mitigation, budgets and stimulus packages is the question, what do we value. One concern is that we all want to be free to spend our hard earned money the way we want, and not the way some bureaucrat in Hartford or Washington wants it spent. America has always valued its freedom. We spend billions of dollars on our military and honor those who have died defending our freedoms.

Yet just as essential to our defense of freedom is our need to be able to find out what people are doing in our government and our ability to hold our elected officials accountable. Sometimes, this comes when one part of our government calls another part of our government to task, the way State Representative Andrew Fleischmann did at the Yale Education Leadership Conference pointing out that some of Governor Rell’s budget proposals are simply budget cuts masquerading reforms.

What is of more concern is bad reforms masquerading as budget cuts, and Governor Rell’s budget proposal is full of these. In today’s Journal Inquirer Chris Powell’s column, Can Connecticut afford to know about government? calls out some of these bad reforms. He asks, ”How much is actual public notice of government operations worth?” Those of us who believe that our freedom is based, in part, on being able to hold our government officials accountable, believe that it is worth a lot.

Back in January, I wrote a blog post about bills before the Government Administrations and Elections committee. I noted bill 5214 which called for allowing municipalities to post notices on their websites in lieu of buying notices in local newspapers. As an Internet sort of person, I’m perhaps less concerned about this than the managing editor of a local newspaper would be.

Yet Mr. Powell raises very important concerns. Newspapers get much wider circulation, and people not looking for municipal notices are likely to stumble across the notices anyway. In addition, newspapers are an important persistent record. For all the permanence of Internet pages it is still way too difficult to find archived material from too many municipal websites.

In addition, as I spoke about in my blog post and as Mr. Powell commented in his column,

Further, many town officials are seeking repeal of a recent state law requiring towns that have Internet sites to post there the minutes of their public agency meetings. Such regular updating of town Internet sites, these officials say, is too complicated and expensive.

This is where one bad reform is masquerading as budget cuts. The common theme between both of these is less notice and accountability because budget constraints. Yet in these times of fiscal crisis, we need exactly the opposite. We need more notice and more accountability of our elected officials.

This leads me to another bad reform masquerading as a budget cut. The most powerful way to hold our elected officials accountable is at the ballot box. The Citizens Election Program is an important way to encourage increased competition for elected office. Yet Governor Rell’s budget proposal plays a shell game with funding for this program as well as for election enforcement and gravely damages our ability to have competitive elections.

Mr. Powell asked, “Can Connecticut afford to know about government?” I would expand that and ask not only if we can afford to know about government, but if we can afford to do anything when our government fails us. Perhaps more importantly we need to ask if we can afford not to know what our government is up to and how to respond.