By Rep. Jason Murphey
Last week the Governor signed into law Senate Bill 1 (SB-1). I was privileged to co-sponsor this bill and believe it to be one of the most exciting pieces of government reform legislation this year. The Governor signed the bill despite unexpected last minute resistance from the State Chamber of Commerce.
As demonstrated by the pork spending in House Bill 1278 which I referenced in last week's legislative update, one of the biggest obstacles we face in trying to downsize government is finding inefficiencies, inappropriate spending and corruption. Once these are exposed, it will be hard for elected officials to continue to vote to fund unnecessary programs since the public will demand that such funding be discontinued.
The problem we are forced to deal with is that state government spending (now in excess of $7,000,000,000 in state appropriations alone) is not readily exposed to the scrutiny of the people. Even many legislators rarely have direct access to the items on which taxpayer money is spent. Most of the information presented to legislators only concerns requests for new spending, with little oversight over current and past agency spending. You can only imagine the temptation for abuse of public dollars when taxpayers and their elected representatives do not have easy access to how and where money is spent.
Read more...Labels: OK Legislator's Blog, Rep. Jason Murphey
Posted at 6/12/2007 02:54:00 PM
