Leftenant Governor Tate Reeves issued the following press release:
JACKSON
– The Mississippi Senate today passed bills to allow the public easier
access to agency budgets and the seeing value of taxpayer-funded
economic development projects.
“These bills are a big win for transparency for taxpayers,” Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said. “They allow the public to see how their government is spending their money. Taxpayers have a right to know how much state agencies want to spend, and taxpayers have a right to know if publically funded incentives are effective in creating jobs.”
“These bills are a big win for transparency for taxpayers,” Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said. “They allow the public to see how their government is spending their money. Taxpayers have a right to know how much state agencies want to spend, and taxpayers have a right to know if publically funded incentives are effective in creating jobs.”
The Senate sent the following bills to the House for consideration:
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Senate
Bill 2546, by Sen. Will Longwitz, R-Madison, requires the Legislative
Budget Office to publish agency budget requests on its website.
Currently, agency
budgets requests are not easily available for public review.
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Senate
Bill 2726, by Sen. Buck Clarke, R-Hollandale, allows the state auditor
to review economic development projects that receive taxpayer funds.Senator Will Longwitz also issued this press release:
Budget Transparency Bill Passes Senate
JACKSON - The Mississippi Senate today unanimously passed a bill to bring greater transparency to the state budgeting process. The bill, authored by Sen. Will Longwitz (R-Madison), requires any agency that makes a budget request to post that request on its website. It also requires the Legislative Budget Office to post all the requests on its website.
"This is common sense," said Longwitz. "If this bill becomes law, agencies will have to submit their budget requests in a format that will be available to everyone. Taxpayers will be able to see exactly how agencies want to spend taxpayer money. When a government agency wants to spend taxpayer money, there should be as much sunlight as possible."
The bill, SB 2546, now goes to the House of Representatives for consideration by that body.
Kingfish note: good bill. In fact, I seem to remember writing about this subject last year.
10 comments:
Frankly, the legislature should apologize to the citizens for taking so damn long to bring their own budget process into the modern era.
What are the chances of this passing the House?
I'm confused?? Why does the legislature need to pass a law to do what it could already do? Is the Budget Committee resisting publication?
There is no "budget committee." And no committee in the legislature has a website. And there is no staff at the legislature to input all the 200 or so budget requests. The agencies are generating these budget requests of up to 120 pages each, so each agency should be made responsible for posting them in an accessible format.
So you are saying there is no Legislative Budget Committee that includes the Speaker and the Lt Gov and holds hearings with great fanfare and publicity? So you are saying there is no staff at the Legislative Budget Office that supports the Committee? So you are saying that the budget templates provided to the agencies are not already in electronic form when prepared AND THEN PRINTED? Check your facts. Again, a law change is not needed. They simply need to get off their arses and do a professional job for which they are already well paid.
Oh, by the way. The PEER Committee has a very nice website.
And so far as I know, they didn't need a legislative act to establish the PEER website. They only needed a little bit of effort.
The so called "transparency" budget bill is nothing more that political pandering and grandstanding. The legislature could have published the budgets years ago with little additional cost/effort and most definitely without a new law.
From the Legislature's website:
Legislative Budget Committee
Tate Reeves, Chairman
Members: Terry W. Brown; Terry C. Burton; Eugene S. Clarke; Joey Fillingane; Dean Kirby; Willie Simmons
Legislative Budget Committee
Philip Gunn, Vice-Chairman
Members: Angela Cockerham; Herb Frierson; John L. Moore; Jeffrey C. Smith; Greg Snowden; Preston E. Sullivan
Legislative Budget Committee already has a website:
http://www.lbo.ms.gov
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