Transparency is a four-letter phrase on Beacon Hill.
The state Legislature’s closed-door dealings are an open secret, as its actions reveal lawmakers want doing the individuals’s enterprise as distant from the individuals as doable.
This storied secrecy prompted Auditor Diana DiZoglio to launch the primary audit of the state Legislature in over a century.
“We hope this can enhance transparency, accountability and fairness in an space of state authorities that has been fully ignored. Traditionally, the Legislature has been a closed-door operation, the place committee votes have been hidden from most of the people, and laws has been voted on in the dead of night of night time,” DiZoglio mentioned in an announcement.
DiZoglio isn’t alone in aiming a slingshot at Goliath. This week Gloucester state Sen. Bruce Tarr provided an modification to the higher chamber’s fiscal 2024 spending plan in a bid to extend transparency by requiring each one of many state’s at the least 42 public adjoining businesses to submit their payroll on the state Comptroller’s web site, the Herald reported.
“We converse incessantly on this chamber, and rightly so, concerning the want for elevated transparency and one of many areas the place transparency is especially vital is round authorities spending,” he mentioned.
It’s a simple ask – as these businesses obtain public funding, taxpayers ought to know the place their cash is being spent.
Tarr famous that each different authorities worker within the Commonwealth had their pay info listed on the Comptroller’s web site already and so the modification, if authorised, wouldn’t be breaking new floor.
“The quasi-public entities have, in lots of circumstances, very extremely compensated people and lots of of them nonetheless don’t share that info with the comptroller’s workplace,” he mentioned.
There’s the rub – if taxpayers realized that their hard-earned cash was paying for lofty salaries, the response wouldn’t be joyful. The bloated payroll of UMass directors has few followers within the Bay State.
“This can be a matter of consistency, it’s a matter of equity, it’s a matter of eliminating an space of secrecy in a single discipline of dialogue the place now we have, in so many circumstances, eradicated that secrecy, and it’s solely truthful that we achieve this right here once more,” he mentioned.
Them’s preventing phrases on Beacon Hill, although nobody fought with the lawmaker. Nobody had something to say towards Tarr’s modification.
Lawmakers merely tanked the thought by voice vote seconds after Tarr pleaded his case.
This will look like a victory for the established order, in a single sense it’s. However Tarr’s modification, together with DiZoglio’s bid for an audit, level to a welcome resistance to enterprise as traditional. Transparency is a subject that ought to be raised throughout each re-election marketing campaign for sitting lawmakers, and for newcomers alike, on the town halls, debates and meet-and-greets with the candidates.
As Thomas Jefferson famously mentioned, “The federal government you choose is the federal government you deserve.”
We deserve higher from the leaders on Beacon Hill.
