Across Missouri, public officials routinely delay, dodge, or deny access to information that taxpayers are entitled to. They charge outrageous fees, cite vague exemptions, lose track of requests, or hide behind non-disclosure agreements, treating transparency as a nuisance rather than a requirement.

Years ago my colleagues wrote about the prohibitively high fees municipalities sought just to turn over the most basic financial data—the city checkbook. That’s just the beginning.

Consider Kansas City’s downtown ballpark negotiations. Mayor Quinton Lucas indicated he was willing to share details, so I took him up on it. I filed an open records request through the city website. Having received no response for almost two weeks (state law requires action be taken within three days), I followed up only to be told that the request had been wrongly assigned and had been sitting idle. A city employee resolved the issue, adding, “Let’s keep our fingers crossed” that it works this time. Two weeks later I was emailed: “All responsive records pertaining to this request are closed records pursuant to Sec 610.021(12) because such records are related to negotiations for a contract prior to its execution.”

The Kansas City Star reports that the city is again in negotiations with the Royals to subsidize a downtown park. Elected leaders are apparently eager to make sure the deal is not only kept secret, but also that it avoids any public vote.

In August 2025, I asked the Kansas City Streetcar Authority for records about the construction costs of its new Main Street extension—reported to be the most expensive streetcar line in the country at over $100 million per mile. My request was redirected to city staff who told me the matter was under review. I followed up in late October and was told the city would contact me by the end of that week. It’s been almost three months with no update.

In one recent case, a state employee told me the data I needed would take just 20 minutes to find—but only after a formal Sunshine Request was submitted and processed. This person did not know how long that would take. I got the information five days later, and I was grateful. But it underscored a troubling reality: a process meant to promote transparency is now often used to delay it.

Then there are the NDAs. The director of Missouri’s Department of Economic Development signed one with both the Royals and Chiefs—and indicated in a legislative hearing that she may not be able to answer questions. PortKC even requires companies sign an NDA in its application. While sealed bids may serve public interest in competitive contracting, secrecy around subsidies undermines the very idea of public oversight.

Missouri’s Sunshine Law could be a valuable tool, but it needs to be refreshed and its exceptions narrowed. Doing so would not merely combat waste, fraud, and abuse, but would also encourage better public policy.

The post Missouri’s Sunshine Law Needs More than Good Intentions appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Two Clay County Commissioners, Jason Withington and Scott Wagner, as well as Jackson County Executive Frank White, stated publicly that Kansas City—which sits in Jackson County—made a significant offer over and above the Jackson County sales tax that changed the course of those negotiations.

What was that offer?

We don’t know. Similar open records requests to Kansas City were denied citing ongoing negotiations. Clay County leaders initially denied requests as well. However, the Clay County Commission was made aware of the records request and the dubious claims made to keep those records closed. On February 22, the commission agreed to release the documents.

The Kansas City Council should follow suit. As I wrote to all the members of the Council on April 15:

The City denied my records request (R012348-030124) relying on an understanding of Missouri statutes that allows for sealed bids to be closed. But the negotiations with the Royals were not the result of any bid responding to a city-issued RFP or RFQ. They were more likely similar to any negotiations for incentives that go through the EDC—which are all public documents. Even if they were sealed initially, the vote itself is a clear sign that those negotiations are ended. The documents are public.

Please exercise your legislative authority by directing the city to release these term sheets, any related documents and their various iterations over time. The April 2 campaign was dogged by a lack of transparency—the measure’s defeat is a clear signal that Kansas Citians should know more, not less, about these negotiations.

I’ve received no responses to that email. There is no indication that the city is in any ongoing negotiations. And even if it were, there is no reason to keep the prior negotiations secret.

The post Release Those Records, Kansas City! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Linked here are documents regarding those negotiations received through an open records request:

• Email exchange setting up the initial August 15, 2023, meeting between Royals representatives and Clay County leadership
• July 7, 2023: The initial term sheet for the proposed lease agreement
• September 15, 2023: Clay County’s term sheet discussion points
• September 28, 2023: Royals’ presentation on the proposal
• October 17, 2023: Clay County’s revised proposal
• November 20, 2023: Royals’ second presentation
• December 2023: Clay County’s summary of negotiations to date
• Email exchanges between Royals leadership and various North Kansas City government agencies detailing infrastructure costs from JE Dunn, a fiscal impact analysis by bakertilly Municipal Advisors, and a letter from local police to the Royals. It also includes a letter from the Royals putting the negotiations “on hold with Clay County, Missouri, as we work through a competing opportunity in Jackson County.” That last letter is dated January 16, 2024.

The post Details of the Negotiations Between the Royals and Clay County appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several days later I received a reply by, of all things, email! Thankfully, the Governor’s office sent just what I wanted: the statistics and sources behind its claims. I must note that the original graphic was updated after I sent the Sunshine request (e.g., the word “low” was removed from “Low Cost of Doing Business”). Also, while each of the office’s claims does correspond to a study, index, or ranking in the real world, your mileage may vary regarding their persuasiveness.

Some citations used by the governor are very subjective. Several of the statistics, such as “On-the-Job Training” and “Apprenticeships” were from Missouri Government agencies, which doesn’t strike me as the most unbiased source of information. The document I received also—somewhat—answers my question from the last post and clarifies the statistic as “New Apprenticeships,” but the website’s graphic remains unchanged in that regard.

In some cases, the claim is ambiguous; the second-place ranking for state-level veteran benefits is based on the number of distinct benefits offered but does not consider that one benefit may be much more or less valuable than another. Again, a very subjective ranking.

And even when the statistics could be represented more favorably for the governor, they remain misleading. The “Fourth for Personal Income Tax” is certainly not measuring the lowest or highest personal income tax rates. There are eight states with no income tax (nine if you include New Hampshire), and Missouri isn’t one of them. It turns out that the governor’s office was relying on a report that ranks governors, not states. The “personal income tax” metric is derived not only by the level of income tax, but how much it has changed over each governor’s term—the governor can thank his special session last October for getting him so highly ranked on this metric.

I do appreciate that the governor’s office didn’t drag its feet with my request and provided sources for each of the claims, but I shouldn’t have had to submit a Sunshine request in the first place. It should be standard practice for the government to include sources for the claims in the documents they produce and, more to the point, practice transparency without hiding behind a fax machine. Thankfully, there are organizations like the Show-Me Institute that employ summer interns who can hold our government accountable.

*pats self on back*

If you are interested in checking out the sources yourself, click here to see the .pdf file I received from the governor’s office.

The post Just the Fax, Ma’am: Dubious “Rankings” Press Release Emphasizes Importance of Transparency (part 2) 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.

That said, there is a great deal of balancing that has to take place when considering legislation like this. After all, employers and landlords both have their own interests in having a full picture of who they’re hiring or housing. Does a bank want to hire someone convicted of fraud? Probably not. Good faith arguments about the manner and extent of expungement laws are an important part of the process, and those debates are happening in Missouri over Clean Slate. For me, a Missouri version of Clean Slate needs to ensure two things happen.

First, in contrast to Clean Slate’s “automatic expungement” proposal, why not have former offenders initiate the expungement process, after which expungement is automatic?

It’s a nuanced but important point. Supporters of model Clean Slate legislative language generally prefer the idea of “automatic expungement”—that after a certain period of time, an offense drops off criminal records without any action taken by the ex-offender. In Missouri, the existing expungement process is a petition-based system, which can be fraught, winding, and ultimately unwieldy for many former offenders to navigate. Many don’t bother, leaving expungeable offenses on their records.

But combining the offender-initiated expungement process with automated expungement offers the best of both worlds. It puts the responsibility on an offender to start the process of beginning a new chapter in their lives and strikes out the judicial bureaucracy that stops many ex-offenders from initiating expungement to begin with.

Second, the state should not impose a sort of prior restraint on background check companies.

The standard Clean Slate proposal contemplates restrictions on what background check companies can tell employers and landlords, even if what they tell them is true. There’s no denying the truth that ex-offenders broke the law, and background check companies have the right to share truthful information about an individual’s criminal record. The question is, how do you best balance the First Amendment rights of companies and the policy objectives of Clean Slate?

Well, a better way forward is to set out legal incentives for background check companies in the way they characterize past expunged offenses. The state should allow background check companies (1) to omit expunged offenses and protect them from liability for that omission, and (2) to report the expunged offense but only if its expungement is clearly included. Such an approach would not only allow background check companies a path to omit offenses without running afoul of the First Amendment, but it would also give ex-offenders a right to sue for defamation if their criminal history is mischaracterized by these companies.

Central to the issue of background checks is how those performing background checks even gain access to this criminal justice information, which at its core is a kind of transparency issue. Missouri has a robust court activity database where reams of case information are readily available to the public, and overall, that’s a good thing.

But while transparency of government is extraordinarily important, transparency of the records of individuals is a thornier policy subject. Individual income tax filings are highly protected documents not subject to public perusal; should non-violent and comparatively low-level criminal offenses be treated similarly? Perhaps. In any case, if the expungement of criminal records is ever to be properly effectuated, legislators must also assess how available these records should be in general.

As with all policy proposals, legislators should weigh out all the costs and benefits of Clean Slate, both as originally proposed and as it might be modified for Missouri. For a complex issue like criminal justice reform, the details matter, and getting those details right can take time. Clean Slate may or may not get done this year, but with a few tweaks, I think it can get done here in Missouri sooner, not later.

The post A (Tweaked) Clean Slate Bill Offers an Important Opportunity for Criminal Justice Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Yet while most elected officials have been sworn in and are settling into their offices this week, one important elected office remains between occupants—the office of the auditor, which gets a new officeholder on Monday, January 9. I’ve long been a fan of the state’s auditors because the office plays a critical role in promoting good, transparent, and accountable government, and I’m hopeful that over time, the legislature will vest more oversight power (and funding) in this important office.

That doesn’t mean the next auditor is without powerful tools at his disposal; he’s made clear his intention to focus some of his firepower on educational transparency in curricula, spending, and performance. That’s stupendous stuff. But the auditor ought to include revised reporting expectations for all local governments, as well. More local government transparency would also advance the treasurer’s Show-Me Checkbook.

As I reiterated on January 4, 2021, “the Auditor’s Office could make the Show-Me State a leader on the issue [of spending transparency] by leveraging the office’s existing rule-making power.” How? By using Section 105.145 of Missouri’s Revised Statutes:

2. The governing body of each political subdivision in the state shall cause to be prepared an annual report of the financial transactions of the political subdivision in such summary form as the state auditor shall prescribe by rule, except that the annual report of political subdivisions whose cash receipts for the reporting period are ten thousand dollars or less shall only be required to contain the cash balance at the beginning of the reporting period, a summary of cash receipts, a summary of cash disbursements and the cash balance at the end of the reporting period. [Emphasis mine]

There are many avenues for the auditor to pursue greater transparency in local spending, but importantly, it seems to me that 105.145 allows the auditor to require political subdivisions to include supporting documentation for their annual transaction reports. 105.145 clearly states that the auditor gets to prescribe the form of these summary reports, and the auditor could easily declare that these financial summaries must include all supporting transaction documents. In addition, those transactions should be made public by the auditor’s office and posted to the treasurer’s Show-Me Checkbook website.

This is, of course, only one idea in a month that is chock full of them in the legislature, but as the auditor considers projects to undertake outside the realm of education, I hope he considers reforming the way all local spending is reported to him, and to the public. The legislature could explicitly require such reporting by passing a new law, of course, and it might in 2023 or beyond. But I don’t think the auditor needs to wait for additional authority from legislators to advance the public interest in spending transparency.

The post Reminder: Missouri’s Auditor Has Power to Promote Spending Transparency 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.

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.

Unfortunately, Exeter’s response to our request didn’t live up to the cheery atmosphere of its Facebook account, which has the city’s brightly colored logo of a cartoon tree as its profile picture. Two days after we sent our initial request, city attorney Darwin Groomer responded with this:

“Before the City will comply with your records request, you must tell me who you are and why you believe you need the information. No one has ever heard of you. Your request/demand is denied, until you comply with our demands, and until we deem it necessary to comply.”

Obviously, there are some real problems with Mr. Groomer’s response. I’m not a lawyer, but it was just as clear to me as to the attorney on our checkbook request team that there’s no loophole in the Sunshine Law requiring the government in question to have heard of the person making the request. The law is intended to make government documents accessible to anyone who wants to see them, not just those who city officials decide meet their personal criteria. After we informed the Attorney General’s office of Exeter’s violation, we received a second email in which Mr. Groomer told us that at some point he would provide an estimate. We received the estimate, $15, almost 2 weeks later.

Of all the cities in this year’s municipal checkbook project, Exeter’s initial flat-out refusal to comply unless we met a standard set not by a democratic process, but arbitrarily by a single attorney, showed the least interest in transparency. Even though the city eventually complied with our request at a fair price, I believe Exeter residents deserve better than a government that may decide to invent exceptions to a law that protects citizens’ right to know how city officials make important decisions and spend public money.

The post In Denial: Municipal Checkbook Hall of Shame 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.

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$40,609.01. That’s what the Lee’s Summit School District wants to complete our Sunshine Law request. From the email:

The total amount that would need to be received to begin the discovery of the records requested would be $40,609.01. I do want to let you know that I have been conservative with the time estimates in order not to inflate the payment amount. However, it very well could require additional time, thus payment, in order to comply with all your requests. [Emphasis mine]

That figure looks bad, but it’s actually far worse than that. The main cost driver for the estimate is the request for whether teachers are including CRT in their lesson plans, and for that, the district estimates it would cost $35,997 per quarter!

That’s right—if you want to find out what’s in Lee’s Summit’s lesson plans for a full year, it looks like you’d be on the hook for over $140,000.

Organization and efficiency of reviewing all lesson plans would need to be a priority in this task. Therefore, I am suggesting that we review one quarter at a time. Each teacher has their own pay rate, depending on degrees completed and years of service. For purposes of this estimate, I will use the lowest hourly pay rate for a teacher which would be $27.69. I also will estimate one hour per teacher to review one quarter of the school year. For us, the first quarter will begin on August 25 and end on October 22. The total estimate would be 1300 hours @ $27.69 = $35,997. [Emphasis mine]

You can peruse the full correspondence at the link. We were able to get a handful of documents from Lee’s Summit prior to this demand; I don’t know what, if anything, changed since then, though it should be noted that the district has been in the news lately over a racial controversy.

Regardless, it’s not just startling that the district would demand tens of thousands of dollars for these records; it’s startling that the district apparently has no idea what teachers are actually teaching in their classrooms. Putting up an absurd barrier like this and preventing parents from seeing what their kids are being taught is bad governance. Lee’s Summit parents deserve better.

The post Lee’s Summit School District Wants $40,000 to Show What It’s Teaching Kids appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In fact, checkbook transparency is an issue that multiple branches of Missouri government have consistently recognized since the rollout of the Institute’s Show-Me Checkbook projects. In 2018, the Missouri Treasurer’s office introduced the aptly named ”Show-Me Checkbook,” cataloguing state spending in a comprehensive way that, to that time, had only existed on the Show-Me Institute website. Meanwhile, the Missouri legislature introduced, and the House passed, legislation that would have required city governments in Missouri to report these checkbook records to the state for publication.

But could the Missouri Auditor’s Office get ahead of them all and deliver taxpayers a game-changing transparency win?

Strong municipal transparency laws are few and far-between around the country, but the Auditor’s Office could make the Show-Me State a leader on the issue by leveraging the office’s existing rule-making power. Section 105.145 of Missouri’s Revised Statutes states:

2. The governing body of each political subdivision in the state shall cause to be prepared an annual report of the financial transactions of the political subdivision in such summary form as the state auditor shall prescribe by rule, except that the annual report of political subdivisions whose cash receipts for the reporting period are ten thousand dollars or less shall only be required to contain the cash balance at the beginning of the reporting period, a summary of cash receipts, a summary of cash disbursements and the cash balance at the end of the reporting period. (Emphasis mine)

Put another way, the auditor has the ability to define what will be required of annual financial summary reports submitted by Missouri cities. That summary can, then, be required to include a host of financial information, including a listing of transactions undertaken by a city above a certain threshold; the public contact information of vendors with whom the city does business; revenues received and from what sources; and any other relevant information that would help the auditor do her job. The auditor’s office could then offer an alternative to filling out all of this information in the summary form she prescribes: to simply export the expenditure data from the city’s accounting software in a machine-readable format. Implementing this reform through existing reporting requirements reaffirms that there would be no additional cost to cities to transparently report their spending. With this reform, cities could go through the process of filling out the auditor’s form pursuant to the auditor’s requirements, or they could largely just submit the documents that would have gone into their financial summaries anyway. From there, publication of the checkbooks online by the auditor or other department would be a simple and inexpensive, if not costless, undertaking.

I have been impressed by the Auditor’s work on transparency issues in the past, and I think if her office pursued a project like this, it would serve as a model for transparency initiatives across the United States. Missourians deserve to know what their local governments are spending their money on, and it appears the Auditor’s Office may be able to deliver it to them.

The post Missouri Auditor’s Office Should Require Muni Checkbook Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Ignoring the debatable merits of the bill, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (President Obama’s stimulus package), required reporting on every project down to the subcontractor level and taxpayers were supposed to have near-real-time ability to see how funds were being spent. This act spurred many states to enact increased transparency measures. It is disappointing to learn that Missouri took a step backward at a time when much of the country was moving forward. The auditor noted, “When there’s inadequate documentation, you don’t know if there’s waste, fraud or abuse.”

Has Missouri learned from its mistakes? Some governmental bodies appear to be transparent, if not exercising fiscal restraint, with their emergency spending. The State Treasurer’s Office is publishing CARES Act state government relief fund spending down to the vendor and item purchased. St. Louis County and City both have websites publishing their emergency spending, showing when, where, and on what the money was spent. The county also publishes future committed spending. Close-fisted spending habits have led some to question their emergency priorities, but it’s the transparency portals that inform such questioning. Franklin and Jackson Counties plan to release spending details in the future. However, no other major county or city has yet published such coronavirus-specific spending.

Some state agencies have published the amount of federal money they received but did not specify how they spent or will spend it. A few identified potential categories of expenses—such as the Department of Higher Education, Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Department of Transportation—but did not provide details.

Why aren’t all state agencies and political subdivisions willing to show how they are spending taxpayer funds? Shouldn’t agencies receiving relief funds, i.e., taxpayer money, want to demonstrate that the money is being put to good use? With today’s technology, they can make such data easily accessible, complete, and accurate. If a county or agency is unable to publish this information on its own, it can send the data to the state for publication.

Show-Me Institute analysts have called for government transparency since the first relief funds rolled in. While some appear to be acting transparently, not all are. Isn’t it time for the rest to catch up and show us the money?

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