New Year, New Way



Wednesday’s editorial celebrates some recent moves toward more transparency when it comes to spending your tax dollars:

Aside from a little cold weather, perhaps, this New Year began just the way we like it to – with the announcement of new governmental transparency and access initiatives.

The major announcement came from the state’s public colleges and universities, which gathered together in Columbia to promise they would follow the lead of other state agencies and put their spending records online for public perusal. Clemson’s site is already online (the site can be found at http://transpend.clemson.edu/), and Coastal Carolina University was among the colleges joining in the news conference, so we hope its site will be live soon.

This move, like so many before it, can be credited to the aggressive promotion of S.C. Comptroller Richard Eckstrom, who has taken an office that could be nearly invisible and instead used it as a fulcrum to leverage as much governmental spending information onto the Internet and into the public’s hands as possible. Through Eckstrom’s urging, cities (like Myrtle Beach and others around us), counties (such as Horry) and nearly every state agency now post their spending online at weekly or monthly intervals.

“Agencies got into the habit of saying, ‘Send us a Freedom of Information request,’” Eckstrom told the Anderson Independent-Mail. “There’s an invariably 15-day delay, then discussion on how much it cost. That’s nonsense. The Internet has taken that excuse away.”

The S.C. Department of Transportation deserves similar praise for unveiling its new online reporting system for work requests. At the department’s site (www.scdot.org), citizens can now directly alert the agency to road conditions that need attention – potholes, sign or traffic signal repair, even animal-carcass pickup. Of course, riders in cars can use their smartphones to reach the site within moments of seeing a need.

This change not only inserts citizens’ needs directly into the workflow and saves a little manpower that would be required to respond to a phone call, but it also magnifies dramatically the number of “managers” scrutinizing the condition of S.C. roads.

Will either of these changes, the college spending records or the road work orders, dramatically change state government as we know it? Of course not. But they both bring modernizations that are rapidly becoming overdue. Eckstrom pointed out in Myrtle Beach several years ago that putting this information online was simply how government would be done in the future, but even that statement seems dated now.

There simply is no excuse any more for requiring citizens to travel to inconvenient places, wait through innumerable voice menus, or fill out time-wasting paperwork to get the information they need. The agencies that have automated these services online are no longer ahead of the curve; they have set the curve, and the agencies that have yet to do so ought to be catching up as quickly as possible.

 

This move, like so many before it, can be credited to the aggressive promotion of S.C. Comptroller Richard Eckstrom, who has taken an office that could be nearly invisible and instead used it as a fulcrum to leverage as much governmental spending information onto the Internet and into the public’s hands as possible. Through Eckstrom’s urging, cities (like Myrtle Beach and others around us), counties (such as Horry) and nearly every state agency now post their spending online at weekly or monthly intervals.

“Agencies got into the habit of saying, ‘Send us a Freedom of Information request,’” Eckstrom told the Anderson Independent-Mail. “There’s an invariably 15-day delay, then discussion on how much it cost. That’s nonsense. The Internet has taken that excuse away.”

The S.C. Department of Transportation deserves similar praise for unveiling its new online reporting system for work requests. At the department’s site (www.scdot.org), citizens can now directly alert the agency to road conditions that need attention – potholes, sign or traffic signal repair, even animal-carcass pickup. Of course, riders in cars can use their smartphones to reach the site within moments of seeing a need.

This change not only inserts citizens’ needs directly into the workflow and saves a little manpower that would be required to respond to a phone call, but it also magnifies dramatically the number of “managers” scrutinizing the condition of S.C. roads.

Will either of these changes, the college spending records or the road work orders, dramatically change state government as we know it? Of course not. But they both bring modernizations that are rapidly becoming overdue. Eckstrom pointed out in Myrtle Beach several years ago that putting this information online was simply how government would be done in the future, but even that statement seems dated now.

There simply is no excuse any more for requiring citizens to travel to inconvenient places, wait through innumerable voice menus, or fill out time-wasting paperwork to get the information they need. The agencies that have automated these services online are no longer ahead of the curve; they have set the curve, and the agencies that have yet to do so ought to be catching up as quickly as possible.