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Attention New York; New searchable web site shows where your tax dollars go, how much each state worker makes and more
July 31st, 2008

I have put a permanate link to the “See Through New York” web site is on the sidebar (to the right on this page) under “Government Pork”.

Here is the release from the Empire Center, which runs the new site:

“New Yorkers will get a clearer view than ever of how their state and local tax dollars are being spent, thanks to a new transparency website launched today by the Empire Center for New York State Policy.The website – http://www.SeeThroughNY.net – initially offers searchable databases of the following public information:

• the entire payroll of more than 263,000 state government employees, cross-referenced by name, title, branch of government and agency;
  
• current teachers’ union contracts and superintendent of schools’ contracts for nearly all of New York State’s 733 school and BOCES districts;
  
• operating expenditures by both houses of the New York State Legislature; and
  
• the Legislature’s pork-barrel “member items” spending for 2008-09.
  

The site will expand in the near future to include more payrolls, expenditures, contracts and other information from a variety of New York government entities, according to Edmund J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center.“SeeThroughNY is designed to become the hub of a statewide network through which taxpayers can share, analyze and compare data from local governments and school districts throughout New York,” McMahon said.

McMahon noted that 2008 already has seen the launching of two government-run transparency websites in New York.  Project Sunlight (www.sunlightny.com), sponsored by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, includes information related to campaign finance, legislation, lobbying activity, and recipients of state government contracts.  Open Book New York (www.osc.state.ny.us/openbook/index.htm), launched in June by Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, provides an up-to-date listing of state vendor contracts, along with expenditure summaries for state agencies.

“Project Sunlight and Open Book were significant steps forward for transparency and accountability in New York, but we still have a long way to go,” McMahon said.

SeeThroughNY is the first state and local transparency site to be independently sponsored and maintained by a private, non-partisan organization.  The payroll, school district contract, and legislative expenditure data on SeeThroughNY has never before been available to New Yorkers in a searchable format on the Internet.

The Empire Center is a project of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/index.htm), one of the nation’s leading non-profit think tanks, which supports all of the Center’s work.”

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
New window opens on government

    Here we have one of the fi nest resources to come along in recent memory for those of you who might like to monitor how your tax money is spent.
    It’s a Web site, http://www.SeeThrough-NY.net, created by the Empire Center for New York State Policy a subsidiary of the conservatively oriented Manhattan Institute.
    Already I’m getting addicted to it. Here’s what you can find on it:
    The complete New York state government payroll, easily searchable by name of employee or by agency. Do you want to know how much a particular person makes at the Department of Transportation, let’s say? Click on “Payrolls,” choose your branch (“Executive”) choose your agency (“Department of Transportation”), type in the person’s name, click GO, and there you are.
    The teachers’ and superintendents’ contracts for all 733 school districts, including BOCES, in the state, except for three that refused to provide them under a Freedom of Information request and face legal action as a result.
    Click on “Contracts” and follow the yellow brick road. They take a while to load up, since they often run 50 or 60 pages, but there they are. No more begging your local school district and paying 25 cents a page. No more getting the runaround.
    Pork barrel spending, more politely known as member items or, on this Web site, “community projects.”
    No more trying to decipher deliberately obscure government records. Here they all are — every grant to every Boy Scout troop, every volunteer fire department, every cheese museum in the state, conveniently listed by sponsor, meaning you can click on the name of your local senator or assemblyman and see what he delivered. It’s under “expenditures.”
    The Legislature’s spending on itself, also under “expenditures.” Find out how much your senator or assemblyman has been spending on glossy mailings with his face plastered all over them, smiling at a group of senior citizens with an American flag for a backdrop. Find out how much rent he pays (with our money) for his district office.
    It’s like a candy store for a journalist, or even just for a curious citizen. And it’s just the beginning. “Version 1.0,” E.J. McMahon, the head of the Empire Center, calls it.
    Still to come: the payrolls of public authorities, the contracts of school principals and blue-collar workers, pension payments and more.
    How did the Empire Center do all of this? Not easily. They filed Freedom of Information requests with every school district in the state, followed up with those that balked, and hired an outside contractor to scan in all the contracts they received.
    It was a project that began in January and has cost, McMahon estimates, “in the low six figures,” meaning something above $100,000.
    In a way it’s a disgrace that it had to be done, that is, that a private non-profit organization had to spend private money to disclose to the public how the public’s own money is being spent by government.
Why doesn’t government do it itself as a matter of course?
Why don’t school districts as a matter of course post on their Web sites the contracts that they sign with their employees?
Why doesn’t the Legislature make freely available in an easily understood format a list of all the “community projects” that its individual members are allowed to take credit for?
You can guess the answer as well as I can.
There is an outside chance that we, the overburdened public, might raise an eyebrow at some of the spending.
    We might be stunned at the number of our employees getting paid in excess of $100,000 for what seem like routine jobs. We might raise questions about some of the benefits they receive. We might wonder at the necessity of supporting a local social club with a state grant, a state grant that was subject to no debate and no review.
    At the unveiling of this Web site the other day for the benefit of the media, McMahon emphasized that there was no analysis, no opinion presented. Just bare numbers and bare documents.
    Still, a reporter wanted to know, was not the intention to stir indignation in the breast of the taxpayer and induce him to think like the Manhattan Institute?
    “It’s conceivable people could get outraged and feel more fiscally conservative,” McMahon drolly conceded.
    One word of caution from a seasoned reader of public-employee contracts: They are not necessarily easy to understand.
    Don’t think you will be able to pull up your local teachers’ contract and right off the bat have a clear picture of how much they get paid and what benefits they receive.
    The contracts are written by lawyers for the benefit of lawyers and you must pick your way through the arcana of differentials and step increases to figure out what’s going on.
    Some of it’s clear, but much of it is not, if you are untutored in labor lingo.
    Something in particular to watch out for: The salaries that are tabulated in these contracts are often for those who hold only a bachelor’s degree, and you have to look in the footnotes to see what the “differential” is for those with master’s degrees.
    Since virtually all teachers have master’s degrees as a basic requirement, the table is deceptive. Check to see how much to add to every line.
DEAR UNITARIANS
    The other day I commented on the different responses to shootings in a Unitarian church and a fundamentalist church, thinking that if I angered the fundamentalists at least I would get myself in solid with the Unitarians, so of course I was surprised at the letter in Sunday’s paper from a Unitarian trustee, finding fault with my modest efforts.

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If every lowly state worker has to have his or her name and salary made public, then this website needs to also post the names of each and every lowly welfare recipient and how much they get, be sure to include all that state money for food stamps, medicaid, HEAP, the cash, etc.

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Not all salaries are born equal

By FRED LeBRUN
First published: Sunday, August 10, 2008

A number of state workers have gotten their shorts in a bind because on Friday this newspaper published online the state payroll, with names and salaries.
Predictably, the indignation over a broadly perceived violation of a right to privacy has swelled into a roar of "how dare yous" hurled at the newspaper. Other newspapers publishing comparable information in other states have gotten pretty much the same indignant reaction.

First off, and most obviously, taxpayer-funded salaries are public information. The Legislature's intention in making the payroll public is very clear, and makes good sense. You can just imagine the abuses that would happen if it weren't public information.

So there is no right to privacy. It follows then that the newspaper has a right to publish all those names and salaries.

That said, I think what the newspaper has chosen to do here is a little unfair.

Just because we have a right to publish the information doesn't mean we necessarily should.

Now, even before I get into my reasoning for why some state workers deserve the glare of publicity and others do not, by way of full disclosure let me say that my wife is a career New York state civil servant and her salary is listed among the 375,000 in our online database. But she could not care less that it is posted and maintains state worker salaries are and ought to be available for public scrutiny.

Broadly speaking, the state work force is primarily composed of career types who take competitive exams for their jobs. They are employees of government, persisting through often many changes of administration and ruling political parties without missing a beat in what they do.

Then there are the many state workers and higher-ups exempt from civil service classifications who are hired as political appointees by the reigning administration.

These workers owe their employment to the political process. I don't mean to paint them as second-class workers, by any means, but the origin of their employment is in whom they know, rather than what they know. Many have fallback civil service positions at lower salaries, but that's something else.

You can see where I'm going here. Neither the career government employee nor the political appointee has a right to privacy over his or her taxpayer-funded salary. That's a given.

But, I would argue, the government worker should be extended the courtesy of privacy unless for some reason a compelling public interest arises that we need to know a little more about them. Such as a run-in with the law, or a run for public office. Then they lose that courtesy.

But political appointees ought to be fair game all the time because of how they got the job.

It really comes down to news value. My bosses feel differently about this than I do, but that's typical of the business we're in. I suspect there is a gamut of opinion out there about publishing salaries and names as well, even among state workers.

Whether the payroll information we got from the state comptroller differentiates between types of employees is another matter. I suspect it does not. That puts the burden on us, then, to find out, and I'm not sure how we could do that in an efficient and timely manner. Although I suspect there are those among you readers who could tell us.

There's certainly a compelling public interest in publishing the names and state-supported salaries of those earning $500,000 a year or more, although rarely do our natural suspicions about these high salaries stand up to scrutiny.

Remember, most got their jobs and negotiated salaries mainly through a very public process. Our own flamboyant Alain Kaloyeros, who heads the UAlbany nanotech center, is a prime example.

His million-dollars-or-more-a-year compensation should come as no surprise to those who have followed his career. No one has ever suggested, though, that he isn't worth every penny of it and much more. Last year alone, he brought in $148 million in grants to the center.

Recently, the combined high salaries and pensions of retired school superintendents who have come back into school employment has become a political football. As if there's something dreadfully wrong with making a lot of money.

Yet, what is seldom mentioned is that no one is twisting the arm of school districts to hire these superintendent retirees. What they make in compensation, therefore, is largely irrelevant.

Because just maybe, like Kaloyeros, they're worth every penny to a district desperate for one of the few experienced superintendents available in the marketplace. Supply and demand prevails, as it should, and that always carries a price tag.

Fred LeBrun can be reached at 454-5453 or by e-mail at flebrun@timesunion.com.

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Just because we have a right to publish the information doesn't mean we necessarily should.

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What an oxymoron......

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Not all salaries are born equal