Since July, the Mountain View Youth Development Center has spent $4,952 with the Bob Barker Co. — “America’s Leading Detention Supplier” — on clothes.
It’s paid $2,068 to Bimbo Foods for bread and cereal and $5,670 on milk and eggs from Garelick Farms.
The Lobster Promotion Fund’s entire $117,875 budget? Spent on grants. To someone. No additional details there. Yet.
In his State of the State address Tuesday night, Gov. Paul LePage debuted Maine Open Checkbook, a new website with 17 million searchable state expenses back to 2009.
State Controller Terry Brann said Wednesday that the state plans to keep filling in the blanks, like those grant recipients. The effort took more than a year and cost $30,000.
“It’s all about information,” Brann said. “If you’re not providing the taxpayers with the information, we aren’t really doing the service we need to do for them. That’s what our goal was in doing this.”
A side aim: Boost the state’s transparency rating in the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s annual “Following the Money” report out in March.
“We wanted to get this launched in time for the next U.S. PIRG review,” he said. “We don’t like the (current) D-minus.”
The state worked with the parent company of InforME, which had already created a similar website for the state of Utah. Anything potentially confidential by law or regulation was stripped out, Brann said. He’s checking with department heads now to add details back in.
Phineas Baxandall, U.S. PIRG senior tax and budget analyst, was disappointed to find thin listings for quasi-state bodies such as the Maine Turnpike and Maine Housing Authorities, agencies under cost scrutiny in recent years, but his overall impression was positive.
“It’s really good to see Maine take a huge, quantum leap,” Baxandall said. “Two years ago Maine was the only state to get zero points because the only information you could get was through a procurement website that you had to have a vendor ID to access; it was very far from being open to the public.”
Transparency is important so the public, “millions of eyes,” can look for potential corruption as well as savings, he said. Maybe one department sees another paying less for office supplies. Maybe a contractor sees a bid and knows they could beat it.
Before Monday afternoon, Brann said the data on the website had been available online in cumbersome spreadsheets. The documents weren’t searchable and took time to load.
Quick searches are possible now by employee name, under “Employee Compensation,” and by vendor, category and department under “Expenses.” Deputy Controller Doug Cotnoir led the effort for the office, Brann said.
“We expect to start getting questions, ‘Hey, why are you spending money on this?'” Brann said. He added that that’s a welcome question.
In a news statement, LePage said the new site was akin to plucking “budget data out of government file cabinets and making it available to the public for the first time in an easy-to-access way.”
The website is at OpenCheckBook.Maine.gov.
kskelton@sunjournal.com
Millions of searchable lines of data available, by year, on the new Maine Open Checkbook website:
2013: 1.9
2012: 3.5
2011: 3.9
2010: 4.1
2009: 4.2
SOURCE: Maine State Controller
A sample of 2013 expenses on Maine Open Checkbook:
$741.61: Time Warner Cable of Maine, for the Blaine House
$66.00: Shredding On Site, for the State Board of Nursing
$350.00: Bethel Water District, for the Maine State Parks Fund
$4,904,224.21: Scientific Games Inc., for the Liquor and Lottery Commission
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