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 Budgets, audits, lobbyist contracts and other local government
records should be easy for taxpayers to obtain, but too often they are not.
State Rep. Anna Moeller, D-Elgin, introduced House Bill 2810 to help fix that.
It is headed to the Illinois House floor for a vote after unanimously passing
out of committee on March 26.
Under HB 2810, local governments would need to either host required information
on their website or through the Illinois Transparency & Accountability Portal.
Information would include: annual budgets and financial audits; the designated
Freedom of Information Act officer’s contact info; public-private contracts
worth over $25,000; meeting agenda items and minutes; and records disclosing the
government’s debts, tax and fee collections, and pension liabilities.
State law already requires local governments to maintain most of the information
HB 2810 would require them to publish, but there are compliance gaps. Also, the
bill relieves local governments of filling public records requests if the
information is already on their web site. Any initial costs to the governments
should be offset by avoiding duplicate requests for the same material, plus
transparency fights costly corruption and leads to better public policy debates.
Experts have long argued that people are more willing to pay taxes when they see
valuable government services in return and when they trust their government
leaders. Property taxes are the largest contributing factor to the overall high
tax burden in Illinois, and the main funding source for local government.
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Unfortunately, Illinois taxpayers see too many of
their tax dollars wasted. Compared with residents of the other 49
states, polling reveals Illinoisans have the least confidence in
their government. This disconnect between paying taxes and valuing
public services, along with low trust in government, helps explain
why Illinois taxpayers fled their high tax burdens at a rate of 313
residents per day last year.
In 2018, the Illinois Policy Institute used the
Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, to conduct a four-year audit of
local government financial records. The resulting report exposed $16
million in wasteful spending by select local governments, including
expenditures for picnics, beer, candy, cookies, fast food and more.
In one case, a municipal government spent thousands of dollars to
have marshmallows dropped from a helicopter.
Worse, the report exposed just how hard it can be for Illinoisans to
get accurate information about how local governments spend taxpayer
dollars. Far too many municipalities and counties do not publish
financial information online, and several governments that received
FOIA requests from the Institute either could not reply because they
did not keep sufficient records or replied with disorganized data
that was impossible to decipher.
By sending Moeller’s proposal to the upper chamber, lawmakers in the
Illinois House would take an important step toward empowering
taxpayers in their districts. Illinoisans deserve transparent local
government, and that starts with easy access to information about
how their tax dollars are spent.
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