• “Deputy Superintendent”
  • Salary: $230,000
• “Researcher of Best Practices to Advise”
  • Salary: $49,250 for work between November and February
• “Lean Business Management Practices and Flow Analysis”
  • Salary: $49,000
• “Cabinet Team Support”
  • Salary: $49,400
• “Performance Management Oversight”
  • Salary: $69,430

These funds could have been used on a number of (I’d argue) more useful items, such as supplying instructional materials to students or hiring tutors. This raises larger questions: how are Missouri districts spending their money, and where can taxpayers find that out?

My colleagues, James Shuls and Susan Pendergrass, have both lamented the difficulty of using state resources to evaluate districts spending and performance. The weakness of Missouri’s Sunshine Law also allows districts to skirt citizens’ requests for information by charging exorbitant prices.

With this dearth of available information, it is difficult for people to know how money is being spent. To meet this need, the Show-Me Institute annually updates MoSchoolRankings.org, which provides an in-depth look at the educational performance and financials of school districts and charters.

Using MoSchoolRankings

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) posts each district’s Annual Secretary of the Board Report on its website. These financial reports are compiled and are the source for MoSchoolRankings.

Individuals can either search for districts or find them on an interactive map. The data include, but are not limited to, math proficiency, ACT scores, enrollment, revenues, locale, website, phone number, demographics, average teacher salary, expenditures per student, and a ranking system for all districts.

With multiple years available, individuals can use MoSchoolRankings as a springboard for further research. For example, consider the below table created from data on MoSchoolRankings.

Noticing the large changes in spending in just one year, an individual could highlight these categories and look further into the exact spending (such as receipts for which goods and services were purchased).

The image below displays how the website looks in practice, using the North Kansas City 74 School District as an example.

MoSchoolRankings.org will remain essential for shedding light on our state’s student performance and district finances. However, Missouri still needs to improve the accuracy and accessibility of state reporting in order to allow parents to hold districts accountable. Increased transparency could help ensure that school districts prioritize spending on classroom instruction and student success.

The post SLPS and MoSchoolRankings appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Maybe I should have seen this coming, as SLPS was the second-to-last district to have its Annual Secretary of the Board Report available on the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) website—and it was months behind schedule.

Transparency is important in public institutions. Parents deserve to know what their money is being spent on in public education. The Show-Me Institute created MOSchoolRankings for this very purpose, providing needed transparency regarding the performance and spending in our public school system. DESE ought to provide this information, but its spending and performance data website is woefully inadequate.

Missouri’s education system has struggled with transparency. In fact, in 2023, the Heritage Foundation ranked Missouri 46th in educational transparency—a very poor ranking, but a slight improvement on Missouri’s 51st rank in 2022.

Increased transparency can come in many forms, one of which is a Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights. Additionally, the sunshine law needs to be strengthened, as school districts have demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars from Institute researchers to access curricular documents. The sunshine law needs to have “teeth,” perhaps in the form of significant financial consequences for violations. That way, this law will not just be seen as a mere set of recommendations that can be violated without consequences.

SLPS is facing an uphill battle this year. We will see what we can learn from the state audit. In the future, increased transparency may be able to head off some of these problems before they become a crisis.

The post St. Louis Public Schools Exemplifies the Need for Educational Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

To achieve this transparency objective seems simple. A new statement could be added to RSMo §105.145(2) that says, “the auditor may require the submission of supporting documents for such financial transactions, including but not limited to check registers or their electronic equivalent, and digital bookkeeping files.”   Such an addition wouldgive the state auditor the authority to require supporting documents for financial documents reported to the state by local governments. The auditor could then post the documents online, giving the public a complete and detailed picture of how their money is being spent.

With such a change to state law, the State Auditor would be better equipped to ensure that public funds are being used in a transparent and accountable manner. For its part the public would be able to see how money is spent rather than being forced to use the Sunshine Law to get such records—a process that, as staff at the Show-Me Institute has discovered over many years, is often made more difficult by officials apparently trying to prevent the dissemination of these records.

No more asking “pretty please” for transparency from local bureaucrats. The Auditor’s Office would be able to deliver this transparency if it had such explicit powers.

The post The Authority of the Missouri Auditor Should Be Expanded to Enhance Local Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Parents’ Bill of Rights focuses on five key areas: curriculum transparency, school choice, parental involvement, data privacy, and district accountability. High among those objectives is the establishment of an online portal where district curricula can be viewed by parents so that they are fully informed of the instruction happening in their schools. We discussed these issues at length before Missouri’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission Advisory Committee earlier this year.

The core of the problem, as we’ve revealed over the last few years, is that the current setup for finding out what’s going on in schools requires either a forthright district (or school) or a district that’s compliant with the letter and spirit of Missouri’s Sunshine Law. In essence, taxpayers have to ask about how their money is being spent – rather than simply receive or see it without having to beg for it. The potential result of the current law is straightforward, with districts playing games with responses or attempting to charge outrageous sums for the information.

Now it’s time for this important policy to become law. By empowering parents, improving educational outcomes, promoting school choice, enhancing transparency and accountability, and protecting student data privacy, the adoption of a Parents’ Bill of Rights could have an important impact on the state’s education system—and improve the relationship between parents and the schools they fund.

The post The Parents’ Bill of Rights: Its Time Has Come appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As systems evolve and become more complex over time, certain things that used to be commonly provided by cities and counties have moved beyond the realistic capacity of local governments. Two such examples are sewers and hospitals. The last public hospital in St. Louis closed in 1997, and municipal sewer systems in Arnold and Eureka have both been privatized recently. Not all of these changes result in the private sector taking over service provision. For example, in the City of St. Louis and most of St. Louis County, the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) is a large, independent public agency with the resources and expertise to manage the sewer system for our region. Local governments in two areas in our region are currently preparing to hand over responsibility for major services to outside providers, and in each instance the prospects for beneficial transformations are being put at risk by a process that is not being managed in the best interest of the public.

First, the sewers. Festus and Crystal City are considering selling their shared municipal sewer system to the Jefferson County Public Sewer District (JCPSD). Like MSD, this larger, regional system has more resources and expertise than the cities do. However, the leadership of both cities have missed an opportunity to get the best deal for their residents. Earlier this summer, both councils approved a plan to consider only JCPSD’s proposal for a $5 million sale of the sewer system—that is, to exclude any other potential applicants from participation—after quietly negotiating only with JCPSD for months. This is despite the fact that representatives from both Missouri-American Water, which has recently purchased systems in Jefferson County, and Central States Water Resources, which operates sewer systems throughout Missouri, expressed interest in making a proposal once the idea become public. Those private utilities have been denied the opportunity to participate thus far.

Leaders in both cities deserve credit for their willingness to consider major changes to their sewer system. JCPSD’s $5 million offer may well be the best overall proposal the cities receive. But how can the cities know it is the best deal for their residents if they don’t even take any other offers?

The hospital example is even more troubling. In Perry County, located between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau, the county hospital board is planning to sell county-owned and operated Perry County Memorial Hospital (PCMH) to Mercy. Such a deal is almost certainly necessary and likely beneficial for the county and its residents, but the manner in which it has been conducted would make former Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast blush. While they probably don’t have smoke-filled rooms for politicians in Perry County hospital, they might as well have. There are two boards that run the hospital—one elected and one appointed—and the boards have gone so far as to deny vital financial information to elected members of the hospital’s own board who have had the audacity to ask tough questions about the deal. You read that right. Elected members of the hospital board who aren’t falling into lockstep are being shoved aside as the board majority forces the deal through. Things like the Sunshine law and open records requirements are not suggestions; they are the law, and someone needs to inform the Perry County hospital boards of that.

In general, I strongly support local government changes such as outsourcing services to the private sector or other, larger public bodies. Divesting entities like the Perry County hospital and the Festus–Crystal City sewer system could benefit both communities. However, elected officials in both places have a responsibility to go through the process in an open, transparent fashion. They have utterly failed that test in Perry County, and they aren’t off to a good start in Festus and Crystal City. Residents of Perry County, Festus, and Crystal City should demand better from their local leaders.

The post Good Ideas Done Poorly in Jefferson and Perry Counties appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Unsurprisingly, this document found its way onto my desk with a request that I—a Policy Intern of two months—was basically bred for: fact checking. And fact check I did.

My first challenge was that the governor’s office didn’t “show its work” by citing sources for its claims. A Google search allowed me to infer where some of the rankings came from, but others were harder to verify.

Indeed, I found several online sources that issued rankings that were similar but not identical to the governor’s claims.  Here, for example, Missouri is listed as sixth in cost of living, not third. Some were further off the mark; here not only is Missouri not number two for “low cost of doing business,” we’re not even on the list. And with some claims, I was completely lost. What does it even mean to be “third for apprenticeships?” Is it referring to the number of current apprenticeships? Completed apprenticeships? Apprenticeship applicants? What organization even collects that data?

After consulting longtime staff members here at the Institute, I learned a Sunshine request was probably my best way forward. Sunshine requests legally require Missouri government employees and officials to provide the requested information, provided that they actually have it. Send a request to the correct official—requests tend to bounce around like a customer service call—and if all goes well they will send back the correct records. In some cases, however, you’ll be told that the information does not exist or that there will be a charge for the collection of the information you requested.

So, I typed up a Sunshine request and went to the Governor’s website in search of a contact email to send my letter to. Instead of an email, I saw only this at the bottom of the page:

It’s 2023. Where is the email address? After browsing the website to some length, I concluded that if an email contact point existed for Sunshine law purposes, it was very well hidden. And without an email address, I had to fax it.

Dear reader: if you’re under the age of 35 there’s a good chance you have never had to send a fax before and may not even know what a fax machine is. In short, think of text messaging, but with printers.

While awaiting a response, I pondered the situation. If the Sunshine law didn’t exist, I would have been hunting snipes in my quest for the truth. Yet I felt disheartened by the need to use a Sunshine request. Not every Missourian knows how to do a Sunshine request, or even that they exist—I certainly didn’t before my time at the Institute. It is good practice in any field to cite your sources. Are governments exempt from that expectation? Citizens of Missouri value government transparency and accountability and our governor should respect that value: Show-Me your work.

Several days after I sent the fax, I received a reply. Part two of this blog discusses the response I received from the governor’s office.

The post Just the Fax, Ma’am: Dubious “Rankings” Press Release Emphasizes Importance of Transparency (part 1) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This report is concerned with the ways in which Missouri counties spent the funds they received as a result of the CARES Act, as well as how each county reported its expenditures. The Institute used Sunshine Law inquiries to request CARES Act expense report sheets from every county in Missouri. Unfortunately, gaps in data created by non-responses from some counties and limited descriptions of spending from the counties that did respond illustrate yet again that state and local governments in Missouri have a long way to go to meet the transparency obligations they have when they spend taxpayer money.

Click here to read the full report.

The post Transparency in County CARES Act Spending Underwhelms in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A push by the attorney general’s office for the emails of professors and staff at the University of Missouri has academic freedom advocates concerned the office is being weaponized to stifle free speech and deter researchers’ work.

In June, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office sent two records requests to the university….

“When I see these requests, it really makes me worried about how this kind of request for faculty information can be used to burden faculty or hassle them where they’re engaging in research or scholarship that state actors might disagree with,” said Anne Marie Tamburro, program officer for student press and campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE.

Your mileage will vary on the utility of the Attorney General’s undertaking. Indeed, the vast majority of the public has little interest in the behind-the-scenes decision-making of Mizzou journalism professors. But that has zero bearing on the facts of this case, namely that (1) the people of Missouri fund their public universities through their tax dollars; (2) the people have the right to be informed about the activities of their public employees insofar as they relate to their public functions; and (3)  the Attorney General has the same right to use the Sunshine Law as anyone else, and a greater responsibility to do so where he deems the public interest requires it.

Academic freedom is an important principle, but all it means is that professors at public universities should have the discretion to research and discuss their ideas within the limits of the policies set by those constituted in authority over them. It doesn’t mean that they are exempt from the rules of transparency that apply to all those who work for the taxpayer. If their work would be “deterred” (to use FIRE’s word) unless they can conduct it in secret, maybe it’s work that shouldn’t be done, at least on the public’s dime.

FIRE should be considering the full public policy picture here rather than acting as an apologist for secrecy against the clear interests of transparency under an otherwise unambiguous law.

The post Sunshine Law Applies to Government Journalists, Too appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The kinds of education transparency that the legislature will grapple with are likely threefold.

• Transparency in spending: Previous Show-Me Checkbook projects have mainly looked at how local governments spend money, but districts and schools also should be transparent and accountable for how they spend taxpayer money. Especially in an environment where teacher pay is a hot topic, seeing exactly where tax money is going today will be illuminating about where tax money should be going tomorrow. My colleague, our director of education Susan Pendergrass, will have much more on this soon.
• Transparency in curriculum: It is no secret that we sent thousands of Sunshine Law requests to schools and districts around the state over the last couple years asking what they’re teaching kids and telling teachers about a host of hot-button education topics, the responses to which (when there have been responses) have been mostly incomplete. At this point, I believe the state needs to mandate transparency of these institutions. Taxpayers can debate whether it’s appropriate to teach critical race theory in the classroom or to instruct teachers that Christians oppress all other religions, but that debate can only happen if taxpayers are aware of the content.
• Transparency in performance: When true school choice is widely available in the state, parents will have some decisions to make about where to send their kids. How good each educational option is will play a major role in those decisions. Unfortunately, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has done an abysmal job ensuring parents have tools to easily distinguish between failing and succeeding schools and districts. The law must change to make that information more widely available and to ensure failure is administratively corrected, not administratively protected. Susan’s MoSchoolRankings.org is a valuable bridge of information as we wait for the state to take action.

These reform ideas are showing up individually in a lot of pieces of education legislation, but the legislation they’re most often appearing in are “parents’ bill of rights” proposals. We’ve talked about those kinds of laws in the past, and whether legislators pass all these reforms at once with a parents’ bill of rights or separately, these reforms would be a significant advance in parent-empowering policy. Parents need school choice, and better still, they need informed school choice.

The post A Reminder: Missouri Still Needs Transparency in Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Overall, the responses we’ve received so far in 2022 look generally like what we saw in 2021. Most schools either have not responded to our request for information or have denied teaching CRT. Some schools have opted to try and charge the Institute hundreds of thousands of dollars to get access to school curriculum, and many more wanted to charge smaller fees. What has been rare, however, is schools openly providing documents that include CRT-type material. Last year, the most prominent example of this was the Kansas City Public School District.

But another notable example from last year was the Hazelwood School District. Hazelwood was one district that provided CRT-related materials when the Institute sent requests last year, and at that time its curriculum included excerpts of the 1619 project being taught to fourth graders and materials provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center about “Teaching for Tolerance.” When Hazelwood responded to this year’s request, the district sent basically the same documents it did last year, though this time without any fourth-grade curriculum, indicating that content was removed from the curricula.

Our director of government accountability, Patrick Ishmael, has been critical of CRT concepts. But it’s important to remember that regardless of the content of the instruction, the public has a right to see it and districts have an obligation to provide it.

Hazelwood should be commended for its honesty and forthrightness in response to our inquiries, both last year and this year. Through two iterations of the project, it is the only district that to date has twice released the pertinent curriculum without any fees, delays, or complaints.

The point here is that if school districts are going to spend taxpayer money to educate students regarding a subject, including CRT, they should make the information available to parents. Ideally, all districts would be transparent with curriculum and would post it on their website or send it to parents before the start of a school year. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and if government transparency can improve curricula, our schools and our kids will be better off for it.

The post At Least Hazelwood’s Honest appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What I didn’t mention was that all three of those districts broke three classic classroom rules I’m sure their students follow (or are supposed to follow, anyway).

1. Never copy your neighbor’s homework.

   The letters sent by all three school districts in response to our request were very similar. Each cited the same list of terms and asked for similar amounts to provide records—Blackwater requested $207,584, while Malta Bend and Gilliam charged $196,908. In fact, the Gilliam School District sent us the form letter copied onto its letterhead but written as if it were from Malta Bend. Interestingly, all three schools are within twenty miles of each other. It seems like Gilliam, Malta Bend, and Blackwater might need to learn to keep their eyes on their own papers.

2. Don’t start your assignment before you read it.

   All three districts responded to a Sunshine Law records request in their reply to us, but they didn’t respond to ours. Instead, they each sent a form letter written in response to another organization’s request on similar topics, which asked the school districts to look for 78 key terms compared to our request’s eight. Malta Bend even neglected to change the name of the addressee in its response letter. It’s concerning that all three districts either didn’t take the time to read our request or chose to send a response written for a completely different situation, rather than understand our inquiry and provide a real estimate.

3. Don’t wait until the last minute to finish your work.

   Gilliam and Malta Bend both responded to our request on the last day allowed under the Sunshine Law. Maybe these districts panicked knowing they hadn’t studied for this transparency “exam.” Whatever the reason, mistakes were made as the response window closed.

In the end, after we reported them to the attorney general’s sunshine office, all three districts charged us nothing to inform us they had no responsive documents, and I had a useful conversation with the superintendent of Gilliam, who only recently assumed his position. To some extent, the unhelpful responses we initially received were understandable, since all three districts have two or fewer schools and, given their relative anonymity compared to big districts, have limited experience handling Sunshine Law requests.

Ultimately, Gilliam, Malta Bend, and Blackwater chose a fast, last-minute, and incorrect reaction to our request rather than taking the time to respond fully and accurately. Our districts and schools should hold themselves to a higher standard.

The post School Districts Should Follow Their Own Rules appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But as it turned out, some of the smallest cities I worked with were the most responsive and welcoming of our checkbook inquiries. The Village of Huntsdale, Missouri, is an example. Located 20 minutes west of Columbia, Huntsdale has a population of only 25 people. All of its government officials are unpaid and work part time in addition to their full-time jobs. Considering these factors, one might expect that the city would just ignore our request, as many small towns have. However, that wasn’t the case.

Ana Lopez, a Huntsdale city official, replied to us within a week of our request. She acknowledged that the village has very few expenses due to its size, and only has a single monthly bill (totaling a little less than $800) for landscaping work. She provided us with a digital copy of this bill, showing the exact cost, who the amount was paid to, and the date. Of the over 600 requests that the Show-Me Institute sent, Huntsdale is the smallest city to respond thus far. As it turns out, being a smaller city may mean fewer resources for officials to marshal, but it also means fewer stones to turn over when asked about its operations.

This isn’t to say that Huntsdale’s response would be the exact format for what we would want a submission to the state to look like someday, when a statewide mandatory checkbook reform comes to pass. We have talked before about the importance of reporting spending in a standardized format, and that format when submitted to the state would probably look (to enter the weeds briefly) like an Accounts Payable report or some equivalent. In that scenario, the state would need more than a lonely bill from Huntsdale for it to be in compliance. Of course, that isn’t the circumstance today.

Moreover and as with every city, receipt of a city’s documents is not itself a confirmation of their contents. Our presumption in our Sunshine Law requests is that the responses we receive will be in good faith. Lacking an independent basis to affirm the truth of a document we receive; however, we can only observe how well respondents adhere to the transparency process and the nature of the documents we got. The state, empowered by a mandatory checkbook reporting system, will be far better positioned to confirm the truth of local spending documents, and we will leave those determinations to when that time comes—as we always have. With that in mind, Huntsdale’s response was nonetheless sufficient for our purposes now.

It has now been over three weeks since we sent requests for spending information out, including many to middle-sized and large municipalities. But if Huntsdale, a town of 25 with zero paid officials, can respond promptly, so can larger cities with one or more full-time staff. Government transparency requires officials to use their power in a responsible manner, with an eye toward stewardship, and that’s something that can happen in small towns and sprawling cities alike.

Municipal transparency doesn’t really depend on city size at all.It depends on city culture. Fortunately, it seems Huntsdale’s culture of transparency is a good one.

The post Small but Mighty Huntsdale, Population 25 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, the most obvious difference between the 2021 and 2022 requests isn’t the quicker time frame and greater participation. It’s higher prices—far higher prices. If we had paid for every school to respond fully to our request in 2021, the total bill would have come out to $59,980.63. In 2022, we would have paid $908,192.38. The average requested cost was $3,332.26 in 2021; it was $26,711.54 in 2022.

A significant amount of the massive price increase can be attributed to a group of three schools in the center of the state that each charged over $100,000 (I’ll discuss these schools in more detail in a later post). Still, ten other districts raised their estimates by at least $1,000, with the largest increase coming from rural Neelyville, which asked for $56,218.95. In 2021, Neelyville said it had no responsive documents to our request and did not bill us.

It’s not clear what is driving the huge price increase from Neelyville. Given that we have received underwhelming and disappointing responses from both small districts and large districts, it would seem the differences in curricular openness depend mostly on whether there’s a “culture of transparency” at a school, not whether critical race theory is present in the curriculum. (Just ask Kansas City Public Schools, which readily provided its school’s curricula and posts supporting these ideas in response to our request last year!) If nothing else, it would seem Neelyville’s “culture of transparency” has declined in the last 12 months.

In the end, schools choose whether their cultures will include transparency or not, and the estimates we’ve received in our curriculum requests show a troubling trend toward noncompliance.

The post Inflation? Try an $800,000 Price Hike appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That’s right. Last week, the Show-Me institute began an updated municipal checkbook project, which entailed obtaining the spending records of every city in Missouri. Every city that had available contact information was sent a request under Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Many cities had data already organized and were happy to share, all of which is available here. Some cities, especially those without already-digitized records, requested a fee before they would gather their data. This is allowed under law, but fees are supposed to reflect only the cost of labor and copying involved, and usually did not amount to more than $100. Arbyrd’s fee was a little more than that. According to the response I received from the Arbyrd City Clerk, our request would “require a significant amount of time and resources to complete and therefore we charge $40 per page with a minimum of 500 pages. This amounts to $20,000.”

Twenty thousand dollars! With no details explaining how a single page of paper could cost $40, Arbyd was prepared to charge us tens of thousands of dollars for information about where the city is spending taxpayer money. This clearly goes against both the letter and the spirit of the sunshine law and was met with a swift reply from Institute staff.

Unsurprisingly, days after our reply explaining that what they were doing violated the Sunshine law and that we would be contacting the Attorney General’s office, Arbyrd backed down. The mayor sent a revised offer, promising a digital copy of their spending information at no charge (we received their information on July 19). As it turns out, Arbyrd’s spending data was available in digital form, but for whatever reason their response to our initial request was to decline to provide it.

The bottom line is that all citizens, not just the most dedicated or persistent, should be able to see how their tax dollars are being spent. Cities should strive to make this information easy to access, without the need to resort to state law. Taxpayers should not have to fight for a $20,000 discount to have transparency in government.

The post The $20,000 Discount: Municipal Checkbook Hall of Shame appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“We don’t have any of our records on electronic format,” the email read. “Everything is done by hand on paper.” I typed up my standard response to this type of email, asking Linneus’s clerk to copy and mail the city’s expense records if she could, and to inform us what she thought the copies, work, and postal service fees would cost so we could make a budget decision before she started working. I assumed that, like several other small towns before, Linneus would send an estimate, I would note it in an ever-expanding spreadsheet, and the case would be left alone until the municipal checkbook team could decide whether we would fund the inquiry.

Linneus’s city clerk, Patricia Brandes, had a different idea. After telling me she didn’t know what the cost for over 100 copies would be at the Linneus courthouse, she sent me one of my favorite emails of the entire municipal checkbook project.

“Maybe I could try taking pictures of them with my phone and email them to you. Would that work?”

That did work. Patricia sent me the cellphone photos later that day, and you can see all 64 of them for yourself in Linneus’s folder on our online drive. Although they may not be as instantly readable as the Excel sheets and PDFs sent in by some of our state’s municipalities, the images still reveal Linneus’s dedication to transparency. Patricia turned in every page of the city’s pen-and-paper operating expense record from July 2021 to July 2022, including amounts paid and names of vendors. What’s more, she was willing to take time to think of a creative, free solution that fulfilled our request, despite the limited resources of a city as small as Linneus. That’s a clear demonstration of the culture of transparency our project hopes to find in all of Missouri’s municipalities, and reflects well on  Linneus’s city government’s commitment to serving the public.

The post Clerk with a Camera: Municipal Checkbook Hall of Fame appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As it turns out, the ability to produce a city’s “checkbook register” isn’t dependent on city size. In fact, the willingness to share with the public how tax dollars are being spent seems far more likely to hinge on city culture than anything else.

And now with the benefit of some time having passed since our last inquiries of Missouri’s cities, we thought it was appropriate to check in and see how their cultures of transparency were holding up. The good news is spending records are already rolling in from cities across the state; the bad news is that once again, some cities are still giving us the runaround, if they respond at all.

If you don’t see your city yet on the online drive we’ve set up, there’s still the possibility it will appear there eventually; we are receiving new submissions all the time, so stand by for updates. And if you have concerns about how your municipal government is spending money in general, be sure to hit us up. My colleagues and I will be talking about both the positive and negative stories learned from this transparency project over the next few weeks, and if you have local knowledge that you think would be useful to that narrative, we’re all ears.

The post Municipal Checkbook Project Returns appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“With the assistance of Missouri’s Court Automation Committee, a statutory entity comprised of members from all three branches of government, the judiciary has been working toward this goal for a number of years,” Chief Justice Paul C. Wilson said. “Today’s orders will ensure court documents that are currently open to the public will be truly accessible to the public. These improvements will fundamentally change the way individuals access public court documents, while balancing the need to protect confidential information and ensure the overall security and reliability of our underlying case management system.”

The rule changes will not go into effect until July 1, 2023, partially due to the constitutionally required waiting period for certain court rules. The waiting period also gives the Court the opportunity to work with The Missouri Bar to educate attorneys, court staff, parties or anyone else offering documents for filing in any Missouri state court to keep unnecessary confidential information out of otherwise public documents and, when confidential information must be included, to redact that information to protect it from disclosure.

Giving the public access to the actual documents filed in Missouri courts may seem like a narrow transparency victory, and in some respects, it is. The average Missourian will probably only take advantage of the new document transparency system a handful of times in their lives; for example, they might want to closely monitor a local court case that may impact their own lives, but may not get the scrutiny or news coverage of higher-profile litigation.

Yet enabling robust oversight of government functions, even if used intermittently at the individual level, is a key good government reform. The purpose of transparency initiatives like this one isn’t to push every Missourian to constantly watch every function of government; ain’t nobody got time for that. But such reforms empower individuals and communities with the opportunity to oversee the governing system that serves them when they do have concerns.

In general, government should have to demonstrate why certain documents can’t automatically be made public rather than require the public to ask first, as is generally required under the state’s Sunshine Law. The state court system’s shift in policy is a positive step in this rethink of what government transparency should really look like.

The post Missouri Supreme Court Takes Solid Step Toward Greater Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

And as often happens with the Missouri Legislature, there is some irony with how the bill in question has “evolved.” Senate Bill (SB) 741 originally only established a “Personal Privacy Protection Act”—new provisions that would protect citizens’ private records from the government and, if the government had such private records, protected them from disclosure to the public. After it was amended in the Senate, SB 741 became a wide-ranging bill that now primarily protects government and government records from citizens.

How so? The revised bill now has a bevy of transparency-denying provisions, among them:

• The bill excludes many so-called “transitory records” drafted in the process of government policy development but not finalized government policies
• The bill grows the list of excuses to close public records and meetings to the public
• The bill removes many records relating to the “legislative process” from the purview of the Sunshine Law
• The bill extends the time allowed to respond to a records request

Suffice to say, if the House even bothers to take the bill up (time in the session is ticking down), it should amend this legislation dramatically, stripping out any language that protects the government from its people rather than vice versa. The “personal privacy” of constituents is an important priority, to be sure, but government doesn’t have “privacy,” and the legislature shouldn’t act like it does.

The post Privacy Is for People, Not Government appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How can a Use Tax benefit my community?

As internet purchases increase, local revenues decrease. Funds generated from the Use Tax can be used to pay for vital municipal services including Police, Parks, and Public Works services.

You will note there is no opposing argument mentioned. If you read this and truly think it is neutral, I imagine you are the type of person who really tried to remain friends with your ex-girlfriend when they dumped you in order to “just be friends.” Hint: the pieces aren’t neutral, your ex really didn’t want to be friends, and it really was you, not them.

Show-Me Institute researchers have filed Sunshine Law requests with two cities that have use taxes on the ballot on April 5: Chesterfield and Town & Country. These two cities are using tax dollars to expend money to promote passing use taxes. They have information on their websites now and it appears more is coming between now and the election. We are hoping to learn about the process to determine the validity of the cities’ expenditures in favor of providing neutral information about the use tax. Chesterfield and Town & Country are certainly not the only two cities doing this.

For the record, there are arguments in favor of use taxes. You can also make the case that, absent alternate tax cuts, they are a tax increase. Either way, using public money under the pretense of “providing information only” has got to stop. Much more to come on this from Institute analysts in the coming days.

The post Municipal Advocacy With Your Money? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We continue to have optimism that, among other things, greater transparency will come to education,  unnecessary occupational licensing burdens will continue to lose favor, and health care reform in Missouri will continue to hew in a free-market direction.

But warning signs are starting to show up now that we’ve entered the new year. Stories like this one from The Missouri Independent suggest that rather than promoting transparency, Governor Mike Parson may instead be using state resources to protect state and local governments from the Sunshine Law:

Amending Missouri’s open records law to permit government agencies to withhold more information from the public — and charge more for any records that are turned over — is among Gov. Mike Parson’s priorities for the 2022 legislative session.

The changes, which were outlined in a presentation to Parson’s cabinet that was obtained by The Independent through an open records request, include a proposal to allow government agencies to charge fees for the time attorneys spend reviewing records requested by the public….

The slide on proposed Sunshine Law changes dubbed the proposals as “Good Government” reforms and described the changes as ones that would “benefit political subdivisions, the legislature and state government.”

You know who these changes would not benefit? Taxpayers. And that’s the point.

We talked just last year about how attorney fees are used to boost the cost of Sunshine Law fees, pricing people out of records they’re owed. Reintroducing such a barrier indicates the governor is misreading the times. Springfield officials—Springfield is one of the worst regions in the state for transparency—have also called for Sunshine Law limitations, and that tells you just about all you need to know about the sort of quarters this initiative may be coming from and why it’s being pushed.

In fact, if a solution is “needed” for state and local government to avoid attorney fees, that solution would be radical transparency: ensure practically everything that taxpayers are asking for is already public and online as a matter of government practice. This should include spending, curricula, and administrative correspondence. What’s not a solution is passing on extravagant fees to taxpayers—the people who pay to have these records created and who are owed access to them.

The Missouri House and Senate should not go along with this anti-transparency initiative. That at least one legislator has already put the governor’s anti-transparency priorities into his own legislation is enormously disappointing. Legislators should not let themselves be used simply because the governor asked to use them.

I continue to have high hopes for 2022, but I have concerns now that I didn’t have last year. State representatives and senators need to remind themselves that they represent their taxpayers—not the governor, not their superintendent, not their mayor. And anti-transparency initiatives like the one articulated by the governor’s office are antithetical to the interests of those taxpayers.

The post Optimism Remains for 2022, Despite Anti-Transparency Forces appeared first on Show-Me Institute.