The second occurred when the Senate failed to override Gov. Quinn’s changes to the Sunshine Commission Act (HB4836). Here’s a good recap on this from the State Journal Register’s Doug Finke:

* There was a bill introduced nearly a year ago that went by the name “The Sunshine Commission Act.”  Sunshine, transparency (and forensic audit for that matter) are words currently in vogue in state government. They impart a purity of purpose that lawmakers usually don’t achieve by, you know, just doing their jobs.

The bill came out of the House Republican caucus and had about three-dozen co-sponsors signed onto it.  It called for the four legislative leaders to appoint a panel consisting of four lawmakers and four members of the public. The panel was to “conduct a thorough review of the relevance, efficiency, and effectiveness of each state executive branch program.”  In other words, look at the programs run by state agencies under the governor and see if they work and should be continued.

Sounds good, right? You’d get sort of an outsider’s perspective on ways to fix government.  Lawmakers thought so, too.  The bill passed the House 114-0 and the Senate 54-0.  It was sent to Quinn.

Quinn decided to make it better, however.  Rather than sign the bill, he rewrote it to give himself four appointees on the panel. He also changed the qualifications needed by the public members selected to serve on the panel. He said the original version “represents only a limited number of corporate special interests. The people of our state deserve better.”

Maybe, but now the people will be getting nothing.

When the governor changes a bill like that, both the House and Senate either have to accept the changes or reject them. If both chambers don’t vote to do the same thing, the bill goes pffft.

The House voted to reject Quinn’s changes, believing it would be difficult to get an objective evaluation of the governor’s operations with the governor’s people on the panel. The Senate tried to do the same. But when the vote was taken, Republicans mostly voted to dump the Quinn changes (like the House did), and the Democrats mostly voted to keep them. Bottom line, the sunshine commission is dead for now.

Another valuable reminder that too much sunshine (in life or in government) can cause problems.

* While we’re on the subject, the best line during the sunshine bill debate came from Sen. DALE RIGHTER, R-Mattoon.

“We need a see-through government,” Righter said, urging his colleagues to save the bill by scrapping Quinn’s changes.

It’s a great line because, about 12 hours earlier, Righter voted with 47 other senators to shield the performance evaluations of public employees from the state’s open records laws.

Guess you want see-through government, but with certain parts blacked out for family viewing.

The votes on the performance evaluations bill had many scratching their heads. Only three senators, Murphy, Duffy and McCarter, voted no. Take a look at the voting roster and see for yourself.

The whole point of transparency in government is to provide a tool for citizens to hold their elected officials more accountable. Despite these setbacks, we are eager for next year and look forward to working towards bringing more transparency to Illinois. Be sure to keep an eye out, and if you want to get involved and help bring more transparency to your local or state government, check out our volunteer Liberty Leaders program and contact us!

The website aims to provide citizens and elected officials with model legislation and tools to launch reforms and expand the amount of information available about government.

As Michael Barnhart of Sunshine Review explains, “State and local governments, and school districts, have an affirmative obligation to proactively share the information people need to hold officials accountable for how tax money is spent and how the people’s business is conducted. We must set the bar for state and local government transparency.”

Barnhart suggests state and local governments all need to meet a “sunshine standard” so there is a consistent pattern across the board for government to be defined as “transparent.” The standard includes:

1. Budgets for current and previous years, with a graph showing increases or decreases over time to help citizens evaluate and understand trends in local government spending, including spending for salaries. The checkbook register and credit card receipts should also be posted.
2. Open-meeting laws should be posted, along with notices about public meetings of the governing board, minutes of past meetings, and a schedule and agendas for future and past meetings.
3. Public officials should be listed online by name with contact information, e-mail addresses and the elected official’s voting record. The names of key administrators and their contact information, including e-mail addresses, also should be posted.
4. Building permits and zoning applications should be available for review and downloading. In addition, citizens should be able to submit and track applications online.
5. Audit information should be available for online inspection, including report results, audit schedules and performance audits of government programs.
6. Contract rules should be posted, along with bids and contracts for purchases over $10,000, as well as vendors’ campaign contributions to government contract decision makers.
7. Lobbying contributions to any publicly funded lobbying associations that contribute taxpayer money to other associations should be disclosed.
8. Public records should include the name of the person who is in charge of fulfilling open-records requests, along with contact information for that person.
9. Tax information should be comprehensibly posted in a central location, including and accounting for all state “fees” such as driver’s licenses, all tax documents for all elected officials and identified sources of revenue for each department and agency.

For more on this, read Barnhart’s take and be sure to visit http://sunshinestandard.org.

By law, TIFs are intended to promote economic development in blighted areas, and this is just another example of the widespread disregard of the law regarding TIF development. Can anyone call the Loop, the center of business in downtown Chicago, “blighted?” Not likely.

Why are taxpayers on the hook for subsidizing such developments, all under the guise of TIF? Cook County collected $875 million from taxpayers in TIF money in 2008. How much of this went to economic development in blighted areas?

Check out Cook County Clerk David Orr’s TIF reports, and you’ll see development after development in the least of blighted areas, like the Loop and Lincoln Park.

Taxpayers, do you live in a TIF district? Is it blighted? Take these questions to your elected officials and ask them why your property tax dollars are being funneled into a TIF instead of your schools, parks or libraries. Only when the public starts taking action on the TIF issue will any true reform occur.

Check out some new spending data available on our spending transparency website, IllinoisOpenGov.org.

We have included school vendor information for you to check out! We’ll also be updating current information (Payroll, Checks to Businesses & People, Retiree Data) soon, so keep a eye out for that too.

Check out a new paper on TIF, highlighting the need for more transparency, a stricter definition of “blight,” and more public control in the TIF process.

Balancing the budget is important, but TIFs were not created to be used by elected officials looking to fill budget gaps. Using TIFs in this manner actually encourages the irresponsible spending that leads to massive budget deficits, and TIFs should be used solely to provide low-income communities with a way of furthering their economic development. Taxpayers deserve a more responsible, transparent TIF process that would foster more government accountability, improve public understanding, and help enforce ethical behavior for everyone involved in TIF management and financing.

Mayoral candidates looking to fill Daley’s seat are starting to talk TIF, calling for more transparency and questioning the practice of creating TIF districts in areas that are not exactly blighted.

TIF is an issue that needs to be talked about more and more so people can start better understanding it and start realizing its significant impact on their communities and pocketbooks. It’s good to see TIF has the potential to be a central issue in Chicago’s mayoral race.

For more information about TIF, see the Illinois Policy Institute’s take on the topic.

Meanwhile, Chicago Park District Superintendent Tim Mitchell has decided on a different approach.  He explains in the Sun-Times:

In these tough economic times, tough decisions are going to have to be made and we want [residents] to be part of telling us what their priorities are…I think in these economic times it’s not right to raise property taxes.

The Chicago Park District is an independent taxing authority, separate from the City of Chicago.  It has an estimated budget of $400 million but also has an estimated $22 million budget gap for next year.  Mitchell plans to close the gap without raising property taxes.

Mitchell’s approach is to ask residents what park projects are most important to them and then prioritizing spending accordingly.  This approach makes the budget process more transparent and encourages public involvement in local government.

The City of Chicago as well as the state government could benefit from such a novel approach to budget planning.

Sunshine Review has released a paper about taxpayer-funded lobbying in Illinois, reporting information about lobbying contracts and membership in taxpayer-funded lobbying associations. Taxpayer-funded lobbying associations are groups funded at least in part by public dollars that lobby for the collective interests of government bodies.

The paper reports 31 lobbyists represent the counties, and the counties hold at least 69 memberships to taxpayer-funded lobbying associations. The 10 most populous counties in Illinois alone spent $6.2 million dollars between 2005 and 2010 on lobbying.

Few citizens know tax dollars are spent to hire lobbyists. Without affirmative disclosure laws, citizens and media rarely see any information about taxpayer-funded lobbying and only through Freedom of Information Act requests can someone get this information from the government. More government transparency is surely needed in this area.

For more findings from Sunshine Review, click here.

In case you missed it, LA Times reporters Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith used California’s public records law to obtain seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District. They asked Richard Buddin, a well-respected analyst at the RAND Corporation, to run the numbers and estimate teacher effectiveness — just as many states around the country are considering, and in a few cases starting to do.

The story was an eye-opener. The Times didn’t just present the results; it named names. Much of this sort of data never sees the light of day. What’s more, according to the story: “The district has had the ability to analyze the differences among teachers for years but opted not to do so, in large part because of anticipated union resistance.”

The story has created an interesting response, from teachers, unions, education scholars and more. See here for some reactions and the full story, including remarks from Jay P. Greene, 21st Century Chair in Education Reform at the University of Arkansas:

“It’s no longer possible to hide the fact that there are some awful teachers who continue receiving paychecks and depriving kids of an education,” he wrote. “School officials have had these data for years and never used them, never tried to identify who were the best and worst teachers, and never tried to remove bad teachers from the profession. It took a newspaper and a big [freedom of information] request.”

Transparency is a great tool for measuring what government programs, or in this case, which teachers, are performing well or poorly. Increased transparency can mean increased government accountability, but only if government receives continued pressure from the public and media and fully utilizes this tool.

For the full story on the LA Times piece, click here.