South County Independent

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — The town of South Kingstown cut $1.5 million in checks in September, from three payments totaling $130,921 to the Municipal Employees Retirement Systems to a $183 petty cash reimbursement to Recreation Director Andrew Nota.

That information, and more, is now available online, as part of an open government project called Transparency Train (www.transparencytrain.org.) It is an off-shoot of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, a free market think tank based in Providence. (A link to Transparency Train is available at the Independent’s Web site, www.scindependent.com.)

The project has four parts: RI Data, covering state and municipal financial data; RI Votes a searchable, sortable database of bills introduced at the State House; RI Donors, a database of political contributions that has not yet gone live, and RI Schools, a comparative analysis of school systems.

“Our goal is to empower taxpayers with information,” said William Felkner, president of OSPRI. “We need full disclosure to make the free market work.”

In the data section, visitors to Transparency Train can browse the check registers, employee contracts, payroll and budgets for the state, municipalities and school districts to see where their tax dollars are being spent.

The legislative section condensed more than 4,000 bills into categories, such as animal rights, unions and water. Visitors can search by these categories, or by bill number, or even simple keywords - a far easier proposition than the General Assembly’s Web site.

“So many groups want to track issues,” Felkner said. “No longer must you dig through 20 bills entitled ‘An Act Related to Taxes’ before you find the one that is putting you out of business.”

The RI Schools site allows visitors to pick schools to compare and contrast, so they can learn, for example, that Portsmouth – a district South Kingstown uses as a benchmark – has 3,051 students, 211 full-time teachers, 67 staff and 22 administrators, with an average cost per pupil of $10.28, while South Kingstown has 3,912 students, 397 teachers, 254.9 staff and 93 administrators, with an average cost per pupil of $13.13.

“I started something like this as I served on the Chariho school board,” Felkner said.

When he founded the institute in 2007, he planned to expand on it.

“We were very lucky,” Felkner said. “There are 44 different think tanks like ours, all working on transparency projects. We bounced ideas off each other.”

They also shared platforms. The programming for the comparative school data, for example, was developed in North Dakota. The legislative search came from Michigan.

He said the biggest expense in the project came from the lawyers and lobbyists who helped them boil down the legislation into easy-to-read English.

“We have not had problems getting the data,” Felkner said. “The most we were charged was $350.”

He said that charge came from Hopkinton, where there are only three staff members who can make all the copies the project required.

So far, Felkner said, the response has been positive, with the site used by people researching specific causes, journalists and taxpayers alike.

“Mostly it is average citizens, looking to see what is going on,” he said.

Liz Boardman can be reached at boardman@scindependent.com.

Reader Comments

The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of scindependent.com.

sally wrote on Nov 13, 2008 7:25 AM:

" I could really care less. I'm busy putting food on the table for my family. These people have way too much time on their hands. It must be wonderfull to not have to work hard for a living is my opinion. WHy don't they put all that energy into helping those less fortunate and do some good in the world rather than critizing everything. "

Submit a Comment

We encourage your feedback and dialog, all comments will be reviewed by our Web staff before appearing on the Web site.