BuckeyeBlog

As almost a direct follow-up to my previous post about transparency, news came out today that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has no plans to make Chicago’s stimulus wish list public. His rationale? He thinks that transparency would open the door for the newspapers and the media to rip the city’s project plans apart. Mayor Daley doesn’t seem to understand that a media watchdog effort would be a huge positive step towards making government accountable for huge spending increases. To give Central Ohio cities a little credit, their wish lists are very public, but that doesn’t mean they’re in any way prudent:

Central Ohio would be jumping with more than $1 billion in federal spending on infrastructure, energy and transit projects if area leaders have their dreams fulfilled by an economic stimulus package coming out of Washington.

That’s the combined price tag of the funding wish lists for the city of Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio State University, Central Ohio Transit Authority and communities within the 12-county area served by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. The list includes a range of projects, from $200 million for a light rail line in Columbus to $50,000 to build sidewalks in rural Plain City.

Central Ohio could use some infrastructure improvements for sure, as could a lot of regions of the United States, but big government solutions like more revenue-draining public transit systems and useless sidewalks are hardly efficient “stimulus” projects. This is why we need transparency, so that we can weed out the bad ideas.

Tags: Stimulus plan

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Accountable Government, Transparent Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.