Make transparency a spur to action

It seems safe to assume that, thanks to the Internet, Illinois citizens today have greater and easier access to the facts of government than they’ve ever had before.

That’s not necessarily a sign of a shift in government’s natural tendency toward secretiveness — an odd April Fool’s “joke” by even so prominent a champion of government transparency as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, mocking use of the FOIA process to find information about himself, gives a pretty good idea of the regard in which many government officials actually hold the notion of easy access to public documents.

But whether they are advocates of openness by pretense or in fact, government officials are more exposed than ever before, and they’re acting more assertively than ever to make information about themselves and their operations more readily available. Which leads to the overriding question: Are citizens, are you, willing to take advantage?

This question arrives today by way of an announcement by Republican Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka. On Monday, Topinka, whose office is responsible for actually paying the bills the state commits itself to, described a new website, www.ledger.illinoiscomptroller.com, intended to provide nearly real-time access to the flow of money in and out of Illinois government. You can use the site for an activity as broad as to monitor the fiscal health of the state — observing, for example, that the General Fund deficit has climbed from $1.4 billion in 1991 to $9.2 billion in 2010 — or as narrow as to find how much the state has paid any specific employee so far this fiscal year. One feature allows you to cross reference state contracts against political contributions. Another allows you to immediate file a FOIA request if the information you want is not immediately evident.

In many ways, the site is a sort of one-stop clearinghouse for information that is available at various other locations on the web, including a similar site recently announced by Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, http://accountability.illinois.gov/. These are all useful, important resources. Some are easier to access or navigate than others. Some have more relevant information than others. But all are good. The thing is, none of them is worth anything if people don’t use them.

Sure, it’s always wise to be skeptical of government, and one may only guess at the valuable information that remains hidden. But clearly the data that now is accessible quite literally at your fingertips can stir questions you might previously not even have known to ask — and then provide a road map for getting answers. They make abundantly clear both in broad strokes and finite detail the scope of financial challenges facing the state.

In short, we’re all — not just newspapers but anyone wanting to talk about the issues confounding government — running out of excuses for not being able to speak knowledgeably and specifically about the state’s financial condition or the way money is spent in Illinois. Let’s start using those facts to build a better government.