We spend hundreds of millions on lawyers, health care and retirement benefits for state workers. We also shell out millions for caterers, engineers, helicopter services and consultants.
Check the state’s new spending database out for yourself to see where your tax dollars are going.
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We applaud Del. Warren Miller (R-Howard) for his leadership in shepherding through the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support the Maryland Funding and Transparency Act that created it. It came online earlier this month and is a trove of information about how and where the state spends money. Any expenditure over $25,000 is available in the searchable Web site. You can search by agency, ZIP code of a vendor receiving a payment or by the name of a vendor.
If you click on the Department of Agriculture, you will see that the top recipients are lawyers. One Henry I. Louis of Baltimore City received more than $20.5 million in 2008. And the department paid at least $59 million of the $99.8 million listed in the database on lawyers. That made us go huh? So we called the department and found out that the state paid those it bought land from through law firms, who then distributed it to the sellers. That makes sense, but it raises other questions — like what is the state doing buying $59 million of land when it can’t balance the budget? And how much do the firms get for doing this? Who picks the firms that get the action? To give you another example of why the database is important, it lets anyone look up the names of vendors and plug them into state and federal campaign finance databases to see who they tried to influence, uh, supported.
That is why this database is so useful and why every county or city that doesn’t already have one should create its own local version. It lets those of us who pay for government participate in overseeing how that money is spent. Only those in government with something to hide should fear it.
Databases in other states have helped to save millions by making it easy to spot duplicate and wasteful spending. In Baltimore City, given the ethics cloud hanging over Mayor Sheila Dixon and City Council Member Helen Holton (D-8), creating a database of city expenditures could go a long way toward reviving trust in our elected officials. Councilwoman Belinda Conaway (D-7) said she hopes to hold a hearing on a bill to create a spending database shortly and go online with a database by July 1. Every council member should support the legislation. Sunshine can only make the city cleaner and greener, to take a phrase from Dixon, if citizens have transparent government.
