New "Transparency" Group Formed; Examination of Pope and ZSR Foundations Released
Updated May 5, 2008
RALEIGH - A new research and education organization focusing on openness and transparency in government has launched a website by which it hopes to make state government more accessible to citizens by providing an overview of how government really works in North Carolina. Perri Morgan, a veteran state business lobbyist, has announced the formation of the Capitol Monitor (www.capitol-monitor.org), which will profile the processes, programs and players involved in influencing the state's public policy by providing background and perspective in an encapsulated format.
"So many times we see legislation pass, like the state lottery," said Morgan, "and we wonder how it happened. Or we see legislation in the news that just seems to disappear. Other times we hear of non-profit organizations which have an impact on public policy but don't know anything about them. That's where the Capitol Monitor comes in."
Morgan said that a focus of the group's work in examining the roles of the various players in the process will be to take a look at the state's non-profit organizations, many of which play an enormous role in public policy-making. The launch of the website includes examinations of two of the state's more prominent grant-making foundations: the John William Pope Foundation and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. "These two pre-eminent grant-makers in North Carolina are noteworthy for their funding of organizations involved in developing public policy in North Carolina on diverse sides of the political spectrum," she said. "We thought we better start at the top."
Morgan said that the group hopes to pique the interest of citizens wanting to know more about what goes on "behind the scenes" in the state government process. "We'll look at how politics, public policy, and state government all intertwine," said Morgan. "In our Hall of Shame, we'll profile public officials who have found themselves in the news for all the wrong reasons; It's Your Money features stories of abuses of taxpayer funds, political pet projects and taxpayer-funded non-profits; In a Pickle reviews the curious predicaments into which individuals in the public policy arena manage to get themselves involved; Broken Rules, which will attempt to explain the uses and abuses of the rules by which North Carolina lawmakers craft legislation; and more.
"The key thing is that we want to improve transparency in government," said Morgan. By providing short summaries that will attempt to explain - in a concise format - the background for various stories that people hear about in the news, "hopefully citizens will know more about how their tax dollars are used to create public policy in North Carolina, making them better equipped to communicate with their elected officials and to make informed choices as taxpayers."
Though not all are involved in the policy-making process, Morgan said that the only way to know is by taking a look at the nearly 40,000 non-profits in North Carolina - 8,000 of them subsidized by taxpayer dollars. "We'll stay busy," she said.
