Directions from Silicon Valley to Sacramento: travel about 30 miles east, 40 miles north, then 50 years into the past. Or at least that's how it appears.
Despite living in the digital era, information is a rare commodity in our state's capital. Any that exists is closely guarded by a culture of secrecy that seems to permeate California's government. We know our state is sick, but we lack the data to make a diagnosis.
California Common Sense, a Stanford-based nonprofit that I helped start with other students and Stanford University alumni last year, hopes to pull back the curtain by using technology to promote government transparency.
We began by trying to understand how the state government operates. We immediately faced a barrier: We needed to know how the state's thousands of agencies are organized, but no organizational chart existed. Even worse, the agencies themselves were often unaware of their internal structure. The experience was disappointing, and highlighted for us the severe lack of transparency - and thus accountability - in our state government.
Transparency is lacking even at the highest levels. CACS recently issued a public records request to the governor's office asking for the state's checkbook. Our request was denied on the basis that, due to the many man-hours required to retrieve the data, it was "not in the public's interest" to do so. While we strongly disagree with their assessment, the fact that government spending data is not stored in an easily accessible form underscores the problem - and is simply unacceptable.
We had hoped that perhaps these struggles were unique to the executive branch, that at least somewhere the California government was transparent. So we moved on to the judicial branch, but alas it was no better. While we were able to collect historical data on California courts, information on trials in the past two years has yet to be processed. We therefore could not do a complete and current study of the court system, an efficiency analysis that is sorely needed in light of recent budget cuts.
Now, in a perfect trifecta, we faced off against the California State Assembly Rules Committee over the release of legislative budget data. This conflict began last month when Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada-Flintridge (Los Angeles County), accused his party's leadership of slashing his budget and staff in retribution for a vote against the June budget. They told Portantino, who prides himself on frugal spending of taxpayers' dollars, that he spent the most of any Assembly member on personal staff. He didn't believe it, and requested details on spending from the Assembly Rules Committee but was told the information is confidential.
The Assembly leadership attempted to defuse the situation by releasing what they claim is the complete budget. However, a CACS analysis, available in a visualization on our website, revealed millions of dollars of discrepancies in the data.
Whether or not Portantino is right, it is simply shameful that our elected representatives seem more concerned with personal squabbles than with setting our state on a path toward prosperity. If we can't rely on the rule makers to be transparent, how can we ever expect the rest of the government to follow the rules?
We at CACS eagerly pursue the day when our government is held accountable for how it spends our money. Until then, we will continue opening government financial data for you, the average Californian, to see how your money is being spent.
Note: this originally appeared as an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.
