The following news release appeared yesterday on the Ogden Ethics Blog, which we'll cross-post here as a follow-up to Dan Schroeder's earlier reports on his recent Ogden Line-item Budget/Water Utility GRAMA requests:
Ogden City Line-Item Budget Released to PublicWe believe that everyone will agree that it's quite encouraging to learn that the Ogden City Mayoral Administration has now finally backed off on what seemed to be knee-jerk opposition to these very basic public document requests; and we'll of course continue to follow this story as it continues to develop.
In an effort to promote greater transparency in Ogden City’s finances, the Ogden Ethics Project has obtained and posted a copy of the city’s detailed line-item budget. Interested citizens can now download a copy of this document from the OEC website's Resources and Document Access page.
As far as we can determine, no such document has ever before been released to the public. According to Assistant City Attorney Mara Brown, the line-item budget was not widely disseminated even within the city administration, and was not shared with the city council or its staff.
Ogden’s official budget document is posted on the city’s web site but is far less detailed. To give just one example, whereas the official budget breaks down the city’s golf-course-related expenditures into just ten major categories, the line-item budget breaks these down further into more than 100 sub-categories, with staffing, supplies, utilities, and other expenses assigned to either El Monte or Mt. Ogden Golf Course and further broken down between the grounds and pro shops.
For reasons that remain unclear, the city administration was reluctant to release the line-item budget document. A formal request for it, filed pursuant to the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act, was denied on January 9. The city then rejected repeated attempts to discuss or negotiate the denial. Finally, during a formal appeal hearing before the city’s Records Review Board, the administration agreed to release a copy of the document—but only in printed form, at a total cost of $169 (25 cents per page). The administration refused to provide an electronic copy of the document because, in Brown’s words, “we are able to track it as a record if it’s in print format” and because an electronic copy “can be manipulated.”
In total, obtaining a copy of the line-item budget required about a dozen hours of personal time spent over a period of two months. The printed pages have, of course, now been scanned and processed with optical character recognition software to facilitate searching.
The present version of the line-item budget includes actual revenue and expense information from fiscal years 2011 and 2012, plus budget numbers for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. Soon the Ogden City Council will begin its consideration of the FY 2014 budget. We hope that the council will demand to see line-item detail during that process, and that the administration will provide that detail promptly upon request.
"Bottom line," of course, we'll be looking forward to some ultimate reconciliation between those revenues which are being generated by Ogden City's 2012 "upside down" water rates revisions, as compared to the dollars which are actually being applied, or NOT being applied (as the case may be), to legitimate Ogden City water utility "overhead," (which would include but not be limited to underlying and currently existing water utility bond payments), of course.
Update 4/4/13 11:43 a.m.: We've now learned this morning that the Salt Lake Tribune's Cathy McKitrick is all over this story too:
Spot-on comment from Councilwoman Wicks: "Councilwoman Amy Wicks said that she and other Council members do not receive the budget digitally, adding that citizens shouldn’t have to file a GRAMA request and pay a lot of money to get those documents."
Sadly however, the (Ogden) Standard-Examiner continues to turn an entirely blind eye to this important government transparency story, which, weirdly enough, continues to unfold inexplicably un-noticed right under its very own journalistic nose, so to speak.
Go figure.
