Opinion: California once led in government transparency. It descended into secrecy and opacity
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The state Capitol in Sacramento on July 6, 2022. [Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters]
In recent years, however, transparency has eroded. The Legislature has retreated into semi-secrecy, particularly on the state budget but also on other major legislation. Due to a construction project, legislative offices have been moved from the Capitol to an almost impenetrable building, making in-person contact more difficult.
Behind those well-guarded doors, decisions are made and deals are cut and the outcomes are simply announced and enacted with sometimes little or no meaningful debate. In recent years, governors and legislators have been using budget “trailer bills” to pass major changes in policy with little or no notice.
The descent into secrecy has, for obvious reasons, coincided with the advent of one-party government. The dominant Democrats can ignore media and the larger public because they know their numbers insulate them from accountability.
The increasing opacity of state government decision making is compounded by its having data systems that are clunky and often offer only outdated information. Cal-Access, the system that contains political information, such as campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, is especially difficult to use and efforts to improve it have themselves been sporadic.
Projects to modernize the state’s information technology have been underway for decades, but have experienced numerous delays and failures despite costing billions of dollars.
A poster child for the data shortcomings is the Financial Information System of California, which has the catchy acronym of FI$Cal. It was envisioned many years ago as a comprehensive financial management tool for all state agencies but is only partially operational.
One aspect of FI$Cal’s situation is that California is chronically tardy in reporting its financial picture. State Controller Maila Cohen recently released the state’s “Comprehensive Financial Report,” a nearly 400-page document required by law to be prepared each year. It was a report on the 2021-22 fiscal year that should have been issued a year earlier, but wasn’t because FI$Cal and other data systems could not generate timely and accurate numbers.
Cohen acknowledged its tardiness in a cover letter, saying it “will mark the fifth consecutive year that California has published its financial statements well beyond the regulatory deadline of nine months after the fiscal year end,” and blamed it on FI$Cal and other technical shortcomings.
The state auditor’s office, which is charged with reviewing the annual financial report, has been highly critical of FI$Cal’s implementation in a series of audits for the Legislature. Three years ago, the office issued a report saying that FI$Cal’s deficiencies were chronically delaying the state’s annual economic reports, and noting that delays were hindering the state’s ability to borrow money and execute funding agreements.
Obviously little has happened since to rectify that embarrassing failure. The 2022-23 financial report should have been released this month, but it will probably be a year late as well.
California’s shortcomings in transparency have not gone unnoticed outside the state. This week, an organization called Truth in Accounting, which monitors financial information management across the nation, issued a 50-state scorecard on transparency and California scored third from the bottom.
States were graded on such issues as the timeliness and accuracy of their financial reports, and their candor – or lack of it – in reporting financial obligations such as unfunded liabilities of their public pension systems.
A perfect score would have been 100. New York was rated No. 1 with 86 points, followed by Wyoming and Hawaii. California’s score was 48, higher than only Illinois and Georgia.
That’s shameful.
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Another great CalMatters article.
Great to see CalMatters improving.
If republicans had an agenda that included the enviornment and human (womens) rights as priorities, we might not have a democrat domination of state politics. But they don’t.
Republicans were sidelined long before women’s rights were ever an issue in California. Three things did in Republicans in California. One was the tech industry boom bringing so much money into state coffers. The State spent money on social spending like there was no tomorrow and that buys votes among liberals and their targeted clientele.
The next is when environmental issues became all about human caused climate change (nee global warming) and not quality of the local environment. The Democrats cornered the environmental issues in terms of damping down US manufacturing, which, since demand was still there, simply moved overseas and created lots of immigration from Asia.
Lastly immigration massively changed the California demographics to include large numbers of people who identified more strongly with being Latino or Asian rather than American at the same the national Republican Party became so jingoistic (which didn’t sit well with conservative California people whose political orientation was fiscal but not social conservatism) . The Democrat’s dominance moved from the south north along the coast, the same path as the tech industry.
Of notice on page 4:
ETHLL 2665 High-Speed Rail Authority Administrative Expenditures Cap SHC 2704.79
How’s that rabbit hole project going? Is it running out of money or too much being spent on management fees and salaries? Or has the cash cow been raided too much for nothing?
The high speed rail is all california gov is concerned about the entire state is suffering because of it
They do and you’re unfair and incorrect.
Progressive leadership. Incompitamce.
As a state employee, I’ve noticed how the heads of agencies are being appointed to positions for how close they are to the Governor. It’s who you know, not what you know. Brown and Schwarzeneggar didn’t fill so many positions with friends, but instead allowed qualified applicants to interview and present their worth to a panel of state management who cared about the work the agency was doing. Now we have people like Nancy Ward at the head of CalOES who cheers on the sexual predators at the agency (look up the Kendra Bowyer lawsuit again CalOES and Ryan Buras) and Rachel Wagoner at CalRecycle (who resigned recently) who said Newsom asked who wanted to run CalRecycle and she said she raised her hand.
California has been on a race to the ethical and moral bottom for decades..