A new political meet-up group got started last week. They’re called the Coffee Party and they consider themselves the more level-headed, non-yelling Tea Party. I don’t care much for either one, so I’ve decided to start my own political discussion group.  As of right now, I’m scheduling meetings for the Tupperware Party. Our motto: burp before sealing any political deal.

Our vision at the Tupperware Party is to preserve government, not let it get all green and moldy like it’s been in the fridge for 20 years. When government is open, it has no shelf life; if it’s contained properly, it can last forever. We at the Tupperware Party stand by our convictions; if you decide to host a Tupperware Party, we’ll send a representative right to your home to help you with your event. It’s a great opportunity to exchange ideas and possibly pick up a new recipe. And one of your lucky guests will be treated to a wonderful nonpartisan door prize.

Just what we need, another group pushing its agenda (that is, when they know what it is). Nowadays it seems that everyone is ticked off about something that the government is or isn’t doing. And, we’re also ticked off at anyone who isn’t ticked off. It’s clichéd at this point to say the country is polarized, but we are, right down to the local level. Polarized and unhappy.

I have this wacky theory that if we, the people, knew more about what they, the government, were doing, we wouldn’t be so riled up all the time. If we actually had the tools to make informed decisions, we may not storm the courthouse, but instead empathize, because we are all in this same short shrift economy.

Because it’s Sunshine Week, during which we assess government transparency, the media this week focused on a January report from the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. The report ranked how well local governments in Virginia made their information easily accessible to the general public. Chesterfield scored badly: 15 out of 100 possible points. The top scorer, Arlington County, got an 80. We were number 105 out of 134 localities in the state.

Now, Chesterfield’s public affairs department will be quick to point out that this county does more by way of transparency than it’s given credit. Public meetings (Board of Supervisors, Planning Commission and School Board) are televised on Comcast and Verizon FIOS and streamed live and archived on the county’s Web site. The county also has a huge Web site that offers quite a bit of information – if you know where to look.

According to County Administrator James J. L. “Jay” Stegmaier, the Thomas Jefferson bunch was only comparing what each county was offering on its Web site, not its entire public offering.
“We think what happened was that they [Thomas Jefferson Institute] did the evaluation on the county’s old Web site. We’ve been through our new Web site and doing a very conservative application of their criteria found that we would have been more in the 50 point range rather than the 15 point range,” Stegmaier said during last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

“There’s a number of things that they indicated we didn’t have on the site that are on the site today… and in the executive director’s message to me, he indicated that the concern was that it took a large number of clicks to get to the documents. We’ve gone back through and most of those documents can be reached within three clicks of the home page.”  

But I wonder, why just a 50? Why wouldn’t we aim for a score of 100? Why wouldn’t Chesterfield just lay it all out there, in all its beauty or all its ugliness, for everyone to see? I mentioned empathy earlier, maybe if we all knew what was happening below the surface we would embrace the Board’s budget decisions. Maybe if the state and federal government were equally as open we could sing Kumbaya, forget about the Freedom of Information Act and work together toward world peace.

<Insert the sound of a phonograph needle screeching across and old 33 rpm record album. > But wait, it just doesn’t work that way, does it? Remember Watergate, Monicagate and WMD? There are some things that those in government don’t want us to know because “we just wouldn’t understand.”

Video cameras are cheap and a recording secretary could be taught to set one up pretty easily. We should be videoing every committee meeting and putting it all online. It really wouldn’t be that hard. For the most part, decisions are made in committee, not at the Board meetings. The fix is in by the time the Board meets.  

Chesterfield has the ability to offer more information online without spending additional funds. The infrastructure is in place; all it would take is the will to do it. I want to see a score of 100 from the TJ institute next year. And don’t forget, the Tupperware Party is meeting in a living room near you and there are door prizes.