Voters have right to know

Tuesday, June 26th 2007, Daily News Editorial
A budget that allocates $59 billion, as the city's does, will inevitably contain lots of fiscal nooks and cash crannies where planned expenditures can be hidden in plain sight.

Sometimes the obscurity is just a function of the size of the budget, but sometimes it is not entirely accidental. There was a long, sordid tradition, for instance, of providing minimal information about City Council member-item spending.

Each Council member has a minimum of $340,000 for discretionary spending, usually in the member's district. These expenditures add up to $36.4 million in the new budget. Most of them are probably worthy, but they can easily be used as political payoffs.

The Council moved earlier this month to let a little sunlight shine on member items, and that was a good idea, though it hasn't gone far enough yet. The list of member-item recipients the Council released doesn't specify exactly how much each Council member gave to a specific group that received a funding allocation.

If a group got $300,000 from a dozen sponsors, did each give an equal share, or did Council Speaker Christine Quinn give the overwhelming majority and just add names of other sponsors to camouflage just how much pork funds she controls?

But the Council is moving in the right direction. Voters and taxpayers have a right to know just who's giving how much to whom, and how much the taxpayers are paying for it. It's only right.