Opinion: Pigs Close to Home - Fighting state excess
By Stephen Spruiell
National Review
March 16, 2007
The Tennessee Center for Policy Research (TCPR) made big headlines the day after Al Gore’s enviro-horror flick An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar when it announced that Gore’s house uses 20 times more electricity than the national average. The newsmaking discovery demonstrates how state-based think tanks are making big contributions to public awareness of wasteful spending and harmful regulation, to say nothing of political hypocrisy.
Drew Johnson, the center’s president, tells National Review Online how the center broke the Gore story: “We hired an absolutely top notch investigative reporter who had been working at the [Nashville] Tennessean. He is a whiz at public records requests.” Johnson says the reporter, Trent Seibert, now the center’s director of government accountability, uncovered the Gore’s profligate energy use simply by requesting the data from the Nashville Electric Service the day after Gore’s film won the Oscar.
What makes the story even more of a coup for Seibert is that his old employer, the Tennessean, had possessed the information since January but never published it. Editor Mark Silverman told the Nashville Scene, “We got occupied by other stories.” Nashville blogger Bill Krumm noted the unintentional hilarity of this statement given the paper’s recent, flood-the-zone coverage of a strip-club shooting involving Tennessee Titan Adam “Pacman” Jones. (Krumm also noted that, adding insult to injury, Seibert had access to Nashville utility records thanks to a lawsuit initiated by, of course, the Tennessean.)
Johnson says that by taking advantage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and public-records requests this way, the average taxpayer can generate a lot of opposition to waste, hypocrisy and other forms of abuse. “Asking for budgets, asking for receipts and billing information, finding out who receives contracts — you can really uncover a lot of corrupt wasteful spending, links to campaign donors, and favoritism in the system once you can get public records.”
The TCPR is one of many free-market think tanks that focus on issues specific to one state. These think tanks are providing state taxpayers with new resources for tracking how their money is spent or, as is more often the case, misspent. “As much as we complain about a lack of transparency in Washington, there’s even less transparency in government spending at the state level,” Tom Schatz, president of the national group Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), tells NRO.
To change this, CAGW has teamed up with state-based think tanks across the country to offer state versions of its annual Congressional Pig Book, a report on pork-barrel spending in Washington. “These are the piglet books, as we call them,” Schatz tells NRO. “We’ve done them in California, Tennessee, Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky… It’s really spreading around the country.”
One state-based think tank, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA), has adopted another national idea to the state level and thus started a trend of its own. Inspired by the work of Sens. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) and Barack Obama (D., Ill.) on the creation of a searchable online database of federal contracts and grants, OCPA began to push the state legislature to do something similar for taxpayers in Oklahoma. Last October, in an op-ed calling for a state-funding website, Coburn and OCPA vice president Brandon Dutcher wrote, “Many taxpayers… may be aware that their tax dollars have paid for things like rooster shows and ghost employees and $100 car washes, but these things are just the tip of the iceberg.”
Since then, the idea has met little resistance from state politicians in either party. On March 1st the state senate unanimously approved the creation of the database, and governor Brad Henry, a Democrat, picked up the idea and included it in his State of the State address this year. The idea is gaining popularity in other states as well. OCPA spokesman Brian Hobbs says, “We pitched the idea at a Center-Right Coalition meeting. It created a buzz there, and word traveled fast.” Legislation enacting state versions of the spending database have been introduced in Maryland, Minnesota, and of course, Tennessee.
Tracie Sharp, president of the State Policy Network, which helps state-based free-market think tanks coordinate strategies, says that state taxpayers have a desire to “not just stop bad ideas, but to go on offense to cut spending.” Searchable databases and investigative-reporting techniques are helping state spending watchdogs achieve this. They are acquiring a wealth of new targets — rooster shows, anyone? — that will be increasingly hard to defend.
