PROPOSED CAUCUS RESOLUTION
KING DICK, SAWATZKE MUNICIPALITY TRANSPARENCY RESOLUTION
Whereas, Government has subverted the intent of the Freedom of Information act (FOIA) and actually made it more difficult to acquire data that is suppose to be public record, and;
Whereas, The FOIA act has been perverted into a instrument to prevent citizens from getting access to public records in a timely manner either by deliberately confusing bookkeeping or charging prohibitively high fees, and;
Whereas, this difficulty often comes in the guise of procedural difficulty, and other apparatchik time stone walling and;
Whereas, Auditors are often compromised in their loyalty to taxpayers through peer pressure, tradition, Quid Pro Quo arrangements and out right bribes, and;
Whereas, the eyes of all the Citizens of a municipality are more likely to catch errors and intentional wrong doings of their elected officials, and;
Whereas, the financial stress we are currently enduring demands that we stem the misuse of taxpayer money through accident, tradition or corruption, and;
Whereas, posting said information on the internet will require fewer man hours than individually printing this information for each citizen that might request it, and;
Whereas, posting said information on the internet would reduce the number of trees needed for paper, and;
Whereas, these are all records that the current auditors should already be getting, the only expense should be in transferring the audit trail from paper to the internet, and;
Whereas, posting this information on the internet will allow every USA Citizen to act as an auditor, and;
Whereas, posting said information on the internet would increase the transparency and integrity of our local municipal governments:
Therefore, let it be resolved that all municipalities (City, County, School Districts, airports, port authorities, etc.) with budgets of 1 million dollars or more to be required to post their budgets and actual expenditures and revenues on the internet in a manner clearly understandable by the average high school graduate.
Let it be further resolved that the the actual expenditures be posted and update monthly within 15 days of the end of the month and that the year end final figures be posted within 90 days of the last day of fiscal year. Said yearly final figures to be maintained on the internet for at least 11 years and 1 day following their posting..
Let it be further resolved that these records shall explicitly include all compensation for all government employees to include medical, retirement, per diem, vehicles and any other form of consideration they receive.
And still further, let it be resolved that the largest aggregated amount shall be $100 dollars to prevent waster and fraud from being hidden in large aggregated amounts.
Lastly, whereas this resolution is a direct result of the Wright County Commissioners, Wright County Coordinator Dick Norman not providing the information requested by Citizen, taxpayer and peasant Don Mashak. And whereas, what they did provide was in an unusable format, locked spreadsheet files with passwords to unlock the files not provided despite repeated requests. (Approaching one year later, I still am being given the run around and do not have the information I requested last spring.[update more than 2 years later as of May 2011])
To justly and properly reward their arrogance and their disregard of the rights of USA Citizens, please let it be resolved that this Resolution be named the :
KING DICK SAWATZKE MUNICIPALITY TRANSPARENCY RESOLUTION
Those were my thoughts.
Don Mashak
The Cynical Patriot
http:twitter.com/dmashak
