Transparency & Accountability

Two crucial pillars of responsive government

Transparency and Accountability are absolutely crucial for the integrity and performance of organizations of all types.  The larger and more complex the organization, the more uncompromisingly these two practices must be embedded into the organization.  I have seen organizations underperform and waste so much potential because their management did nothing more than pay lip service to these two pillars.  The higher one goes in an organization, the more imperative it is for managers to have the courage to be thoroughly transparent and to hold themselves and others accountable for missed objectives.

I am running in order to “bust open” the operation of city government to a whole new level of transparency. I want to be a conduit through which the people of Concord gain a much greater level of insight into their government and its demographics, economic forces, and challenges. Just one simple example is the city budget — I want to illustrate with visualization tools such as the above Sankey Diagrams where our funds are allocated, as well as the trends of those expenditures.

From the budget, to how the many millions in contracts are awarded, to the gaping need for internal audits, to unreported activities involving other jurisdictions, to using data visualization to make the inner workings and key statistics far more relatable to the public, to how our designated contractors are meeting their deliverables, I’m going to be a gadfly of sorts to advocate for the public interest.  This includes complete transparency with the Reuse Project – relevant communications with the principal parties, determinations of environmental studies, potential impact to our existing infrastructure and rates (water, power, etc) by the development as currently designed.  Financials will be clearly disclosed. We need to dispense with assumptions and implement zero-cost budgeting, through which every expense is questioned, reevaluated, and adjusted for our current and anticipated needs.

We need internal and possibly external audits of, and clarity of process in, the awarding of contracts for our roads and other infrastructure, for example.  I have seen how the awarding of contracts is likely the primary avenue for malfeasance to occur within organizations.  Even with established procedures and safeguards in place, it’s just so easy for improper awarding of funds to take place.  We need to ensure that the public have no doubts that contracts are being awarded properly and fairly, and we need to have an ongoing process by which we evaluate and document – and energetically making public to residents – the performance of all of our vendors.  We need to dispense with assumptions and implement zero-cost budgeting, through which every expense is questioned, reevaluated, and adjusted for our current and anticipated needs.

I have seen in industry how transparency is the first casualty of those in power, and this applies even more to those in government – even local government.