We're Digging It! Fort Collins, CO Goes Transparent Thanks to Diggs Brown

Within just a matter of a few days, Diggs Brown, council member in Fort Collins, CO accomplished a great feat for taxpayers: He won approval from his fellow council members for his proposal to make the city's expenditures available for public review in a searchable database.

Here's an account of what happened:

Last Friday, August 29th, councilman Diggs Brown of Fort Collins, Colorado, sent to his city manager, mayor, and fellow council members a letter stating his intent to bring forward a motion promoting transparency in government spending. Aptly named, Northern Colorado Spending Transparency (NoCOST), the motion would require the city to offer on its website an easily searchable and user friendly database to track all spending by the city government. Stating that financial transparency is essen­tial to preserving representative government, Diggs made his case by citing the growing number of government bodies that we instituting this practice and the fact that the city has a responsibility to be accountable for its spending.

The following Tuesday at the regularly scheduled council meeting, Diggs brought forward his initiative. With support from the Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem, he succeeded in having NoCOST instituted in Fort Collins. The City Manager, Darin Atteberry, was very receptive to the concept and instructed his IT department to place it on the priority list.

“Fort Collins has always been on the cutting edge of transparency in our budgeting practices and now we have added a new dimension that will assure taxpayers we are doing our job to the highest level of competence and accountability,” stated Diggs.

NoCOST will be instituted in the second quarter of 2009. Fort Collins, with its record of being one of the best places to live in the United States, can now add that it is also one of the most transparent when it comes to taxpayer accountability.

So congratulations to Diggs Brown! Hopefully they can move up the implementation a little, so that Fort Collins taxpayers can reap the benefits a little sooner.

One would think it should never be hard to get such a common sense idea implemented, and we're seeing great successes, but sometimes, proponents of transparency in government spending still run into a brick wall of ignorance, like Jennifer Miller, a school board member in the Mason City School District in Ohio. Her peers would not have it - saying it would be too costly, which we know is a red herring. What do they have to hide?