City of Aiken Puts Spending Online

More than 50 citizens along with a chorus of state and local leaders praised city of Aiken officials Wednesday for its recent action placing comprehensive city financial records on the public city website. A joint press conference outside the city municipal building cited Aiken as the eighth local government to place spending records online since the Policy Council first called attention to the issue last year.

Aiken Mayor Fred Cavanaugh said the city has always been committed to transparency and cited a recent award the city received for 17 years of accurate audited financial statements. He said posting city records online was an easy decision for city officials.

"It's a step forward and setting the bar higher," said Cavanaugh.

More than 100 pages of information and tens of thousands of individual city accounts are updated each month, according to Aiken City Manager Roger LeDuc. Each of those accounts includes a detailed explanation of every individual city expense along with a listing of who received the payment and the transaction date.

LeDuc said it took one city employee a little more than a week to build the system for posting records online, and he is confident other local governments could duplicate it without any difficulty.

"At the end of the month [we] take all the data that we have gathered together and within about 15 minutes put it online," said LeDuc.

At the state level, Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom already maintains an transparency database for 85 state agencies. While praising Aiken for its proactive stance putting public records online, Eckstrom pointed out the vast majority of local governments are not yet online and encouraged citizens to press the issue.

"This is not just a fad. Open and transparent spending is the way government is going to do business in the future. With the World Wide Web there is just no reason at all not to let public spending be made readily available," said Eckstrom.

South Carolina politicians have spent a great deal of time discussing the transparency issue during the past year. In January, the General Assembly changed its rules to require more recorded votes after months of debate following a Policy Council study that showed state lawmakers voted anonymously more than 90 percent of the time. After that rules change, just under 75 percent of votes were taken in secret during the just-ended legislative session.

State Senator Shane Massey (R-Edgefield) and State Representative Bill Clyburn (D-Aiken) said Aiken's recent action shows the importance and benefit of putting transparency reforms into action statewide.

Both called on other local governments to put spending online and stated support for legislation at the Statehouse that would make recorded votes mandatory in the House and Senate.

"We are in some tough times, and I tell you open government is the better way to do it," said Clyburn. "We want to make sure it's put in action...that we take a recorded count on every vote that we do."

"We're trying to push this all over the state," said Massey.

Policy Council President Ashley Landess said transparency is a critical issue for South Carolina because citizens cannot communicate their priorities or hold representatives accountable unless they see how public money is spent.

"It's time to open the books and put those dollars out for a public debate," said Landess.

Aiken joins the cities of Cayce, Irmo, Myrtle Beach, and Turbeville as the state's first municipalities to put local spending records online. Anderson, Charleston and Dorchester counties have spending online as well. More than a half-dozen other municipalities throughout the state have committed to transparency, but are not yet online.

Nothing in the foregoing should be construed as an attempt to aid or hinder passage of any legislation. Copyright 2009. South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation, 1323 Pendleton Street, Columbia, South Carolina 29201. Follow the Policy Council on Facebook at www.facebook.com/scpolicycouncil or Twitter at www.twitter.com/scpolicycouncil.