Posts filed under 'Transparency'
Governor Deval Patrick’s new autobiography, “A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life”, is an inspiring story, detailing his rise from Chicago impoverishment to his current job as governor of the Commonwealth. While frank about his personal heroes and inspirations, the book skims over his political battles and the decisions he faced in his first term. Even health care reform, of which Massachusetts has in many ways been an early adopter and champion, received negligible mention.
Unfortunately, while his personal story is remarkable, his policies haven’t been a very open book. On vital issues of both local and national importance, I’ve seen pushback, opacity and silence. Starting in January of this year, working with the Pioneer Institute, I’ve filed 21 Freedom of Information requests on a range of issues, including Massachusetts’ health care reform, solar energy initiatives and state employment. Some simply requested specific, discrete documents. But despite payment of hundreds of dollars in copying fees, I have not yet received a single page responsive to these requests.
Instead, we have been chasing data down Alice’s rabbit hole, referenced from one agency to another and back, only to be told, for example, that the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, charged with making “clean energy a centerpiece of the Commonwealth’s economic future”, “does not possess” any documents that demonstrate “previous direct or indirect work experience related to the solar energy industry.” In other words, an agency charged with handing out millions in clean energy grants states, in writing, it has no evidence that any of its employees have experience in solar energy. If true, it would go a long way towards truly explaining the Evergreen Solar fiasco. The situation would be funny, if it wasn’t your state and if Evergreen hadn’t accepted one of the largest private investments the State of Massachusetts ever made, only to cut and run three years later.
Having filed or helped file over 400 Freedom of Information requests, I’m sad to report that the tight-lipped Central Intelligence Agency is more transparent than Massachusetts when it comes to this basic information.
The citizens of Massachusetts deserve better from their employees: They deserve accountability, transparency and to know what they’re getting with their tax dollars. So far, I’ve waited 84 days for them to submit the first draft of that chapter.
April 14th, 2011
(Image from Mother Jones)
The Boston Globe piece by Farah Stockman starts out this way:
It reads like Libyan government propaganda, extolling the importance of Moammar Khadafy, his theories on democracy, and his “core ideas on individual freedom.’’
The Mother Jones piece by David Corn and Siddhartha Mahanta is even more blistering.
In February 2007 Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr., who developed the concept of “soft power,” visited Libya and sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing “direct democracy.” Nye noted that “there is no doubt that” the Libyan autocrat “acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.” The article struck a hopeful tone: that there was a new Qaddafi. It also noted that Nye had gone to Libya “at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy.”
Nye did not disclose all. He had actually traveled to Tripoli as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group (a relationship he disclosed in an email to Mother Jones), and the firm was working under a $3 million-per-year contract with Libya.
The usual glib way to summarize this in a blog is “Ouch.” This is much more in the Mother Jones piece that makes you wince. It’s not ouchy; it is more like climbing out of the bowels of the Deer Island plant and then looking back in.
March 5th, 2011
On a quiet Friday afternoon during the holidays, Beacon Hill gave members not returning next session a chance to give farewell speeches.
The one that stood out was most was Rep. Matthew Patrick calling out the status quo for doing business in the Massachusetts State House.
“If you play your cards right, vote the right way, keep your criticisms to yourself, you have a chance of becoming a chairperson of a committee,” he said, adding that eventually, “You find yourself not participating in debates, not even listening, because you and everyone else knows what the outcome will be. It’s preordained. You continue to play the game until one day you find out that some lobbyists have more influence than you, and you ask yourself, is that right? Or you find out that your bill has been sidelined by someone quietly without explanation, or you are asked to vote for something you oppose … It’s a system that has evolved over the decades and it is all that we know.”
SHNS: And Rep. Joseph Driscoll… laid out publicly something he’d discovered about Speaker Robert DeLeo. “I also learned very quickly from the speaker that he is a fair man and all that he wanted – all that he wanted – was complete compliance with his wishes after reasonable discussion.”
December 20th, 2010
A study released this morning may lay out the possible future of state intervention in premium increases for health insurance.
The Kaiser Family Foundation examined the different methods by which each state reviews proposed health insurance rates. They found:
Many states use subjective standards to guide the review and approval of rates, such as that rates cannot be “excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory” or that “benefits are reasonable in relation to premiums charged.” Such standards give states more flexibility, but can make the process appear arbitrary and opaque to consumers and the public.
Does this sound familiar in Massachusetts? The election year– small businesses health care bill– granted the executive branch the authority to reject premium rate increases if they are deemed “excessive…or unreasonable.”
We saw a preview of this ugliness with the Patrick administration’s (pre-bill approach of) capping premium rates and rejecting hundreds of premium increases. However this approach is neither viable nor useful. Insurance companies may be easy political targets, but artificially capping rates without actuarial consideration is ultimately an ineffective method of cost control. It threatens the long-term viability of insurers and their ability to reimburse providers. Many of the insurers will lose money this year. Andrew Dreyfus, president and chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBS), outlined this reality at a recent conference in Boston. According to The Boston Globe, BCBS lost money for the first nine months of this year because of state caps on the premiums it charges small businesses and individuals.
With the open-end criteria laid out for rate reviews in the Kaiser study, it is only a matter of time before politics gets involved, and states start to reject premium increase across the board, forcing insurers to consolidate or go out of business. The federal bill only strengthens the hand of HHS Secretary Sebelius and state regulators in their rate reviews.
I support greater transparency, but the rhetoric coming out of Washington, and Beacon Hill, sounds more like an old mafia movie instead of true consumer protection.
I think policymakers are missing the point of why premiums are so high to begin with. My fear is that Stuart Altman of Brandies will be proven right that we could be headed towards a “health care brownout,’’ a situation in which revenues are squeezed and government rate controls are imposed. As he plainly stated “The implications of that are not good.’’
December 2nd, 2010
Political pundits have openly voiced their concerns regarding the mounting debt that the United States and many states have endured during the economic downturn. Many are treating Greece as a cautionary tale for the government. While debt and budgets are on the minds of citizens, it is important to inform the public of where we stand as a state.
Over the course of the past 8 fiscal years we have seen dramatic increases in spending coupled with a rise in our state debt. Between the year 2002-2005 state expenditures oscillated between $24-25 billion, while state revenues increased at a rate of about 2.5 percent over that same time period, finishing at $23.986 billion. With the advent of increased Medicaid costs and the Patrick administration, our state has seen much more rapid increases in spending. The FY09 ‘Total expenditures and other financing uses’ was $32.273 billion, which represented an increase of 19 percent since 2006 with revenues keeping relatively even, reaching $31.776 billion in 2009. The gap between revenues and expenditures has continued throughout these past 8 years, which only has added to the soaring debt in Massachusetts.
In 2007 Massachusetts held the highest state per capita debt, at a whopping $10,504; the debt has continued to rise since then. Massachusetts currently holds a debt of over $21 billion, a substantial increase from the $15.796 billion debt that Massachusetts held in 2002. This number does not begin to touch that of California or Greece, but there still should be cause for alarm.
The most concerning aspect of the rising debt is the debate that may ensue over entitlement spending. In Greece there were massive demonstrations over cuts in pensions to state employees. This is a concern that people in Massachusetts do not have to be immediately concerned about. However, this year there is over $15 billion worth of unfunded liability for State Retiree health care; this was a large increase over the $11.3 billion unfunded liability that we had seen in the 2008 fiscal year.
Unfunded liability concerns are not exclusive to Massachusetts. Dr. John Rauh, of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, cautions that by 2025 over half of states’ pension programs will run out of money because they are assuming rates of return on investments that are too high over the long term. Any investor during the past few years knows that in these unsettled economic climate you cannot assume a certain return on your investment. We are playing a dangerous game with state employees’ future.
We are facing very difficult times, and politicians will have to make very difficult and innovative decisions to close these gaps.
June 15th, 2010
The tough financial climate continues to plague cities and towns across the Commonwealth. The city of Lawrence has had its fiscal problems well documented. And its path back to financial solvency will not be a steady march. We all know that.
Mayor William Lantigua has started the process with a controversial announcement that the city will have to dismiss nearly 200 municipal workers. We aren’t close enough to the city to know all the ins and outs of the proposal. But it can only be helpful to highlight some of their job creation/termination decisions so that people can see some of the trends behind the specific proposal.
Cuts to the city’s firefighters and patrol officers by 29 and 31 jobs, respectively, are really tough medicine. The impact on the neighborhoods may be devastating.
Some of the decisions to increase hiring and budgets may also seem quite puzzling.
Leading the list of puzzling decisions was the largesse that the Sewer Administration & Maintenance Division received. They will see their ranks swell from 12 to 22, in stark contrast to the Fire Department whose employment numbers dropped by a third. The Sewer Administration also saw a 90.66% increase in spending. While nearly every other area was forced to make hard decisions about their futures, this division caught a huge windfall, $547,420.11 in new salaries.
Increased spending did not stop at the Sewer Administration. The city of Lawrence created two new positions in the Department of Personnel, the Director of Personnel’s became a full time position, and there is a newly created Benefits Clerk. This department not only escaped cuts, its saw almost a doubling of its budget over the previous year (FY11 is 85.64% over the FY10 budget).
It would be wise for Lawrence visitors and residents to carry quarters with them from now. The city decided to add 3 new full-time meter maids to their ranks at the expense of $147,692.56 or a 347.71% increase over the previous years budget. The city also decided to hire a Temporary Meter Reader to the tune of $34,676.15. Does that suggest that the government is hoping to pay back part of the $34 million loan from Beacon Hill through parking tickets? Was this the right decision even as 60 firefighters and patrol officers lost their jobs?
All decisions in a receivership are difficult, and the need to eliminate over $6 million in salary for its workers will impact the municipal workforce deeply. But these numbers need to be out there so we can give the public a better understanding of what the decisions will mean for Lawrence. Many people will be scratching their heads about the depth of cuts to law enforcement, firefighters and teachers in favor of meter maids.
A complete copy of Lawrence’s FY2011 budget can be found here: http://www.cityoflawrence.com/Pages/LawrenceMA_Finance/FY11%20Budget.pdf
June 8th, 2010
Have you seen the Boston Herald today? Hillary Chabot reports on how Governor Patrick is funding his July meeting of the National Governor’s Association at Fenway.
Corporations with lucrative business before state government are footing large parts of the tab when Gov. Deval Patrick hosts more than 1,000 governors and other politicians at a $2 million July jamboree.
The wining and dining of National Governors Association members by lobbyists, with ballpark goodies at Fenway Park and picnicking at Castle Island, has watchdog groups raising alarms of undue influence. Some of the fun is also on the taxpayer dime.
Transparency anyone?
June 8th, 2010
At Pioneer, we believe that only an informed citizen can hold government accountable. By giving individuals access to information in an innovative and user friendly way, we engage citizens and promote data-driven policies and accountability in government—a government that works for us all.
This year, we are releasing “Apps for Transparency”, a 2-part competition that brings citizens together to suggest ways to use data to increase transparency and accountability in government
During the first phase of the competition- the Ultimate Citizen Award- citizens who live or work in 14 Massachusetts cities collect ideas from their families, friends, and neighbors on how transparency and accountability issues in government could be solved through technology. The individual/team that captures the deepest and broadest insights possible will receive a $1,000 “Ultimate Citizen” award and public recognition.
Citizens submit their findings from May 15th to June 15th, 2010.
Click here to sign up!
The second phase — the “App-Palooza” — will take place during the summer of 2010, so stay tuned!
May 26th, 2010
Tomorrow, the 2 candidates vying to claim Sen. Scott Brown’s former State Senate seat will face off in a special election. Republican Richard Ross, current State Representative, and Democrat Peter Smulowitz, an Emergency Physician, hope to become the next State Senator from the Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex District. Who will you vote for?
In an ongoing effort to help inform the voting public and to ensure that every candidate, no matter what his or her party affiliation, is held to the same standard, Pioneer has teamed up with Tom Finneran and Todd Feinburg to ask candidates the same 7 questions.
Check out what each candidate had to say… in his own words.
Tune in to WRKO’s Tom & Todd show every Monday morning at 7:30 to hear more from candidates running for office in November. (And don’t forget to listen to what Tom has to say about Pioneer at the end of the first clip!)
May 10th, 2010
Our very own Jim Stergios has been added to Boston.com’s community voices blog! A few times a week, Jim will focus his Rock the Schoolhouse blog on Education Policy.
Jim said, of this new project, ” this is just one more way to get that message of practical reform and leading edge ideas out to the public, our business leaders and political officialdom.”
Check Rock the Schoolhouse regularly for information and news on how to fix our schools.
May 6th, 2010
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