Wisconsin's Sunshine Act might as well be a legislative call for spring to come early. Enacted in 2005 in the spirit of a more transparent government, the bill mandated that all state contracts greater than $10,000 be posted to a centralized website. Four years later, that admirable piece of legislation has turned out to be a toothless joke.
According to the Pew Center on the States, at least 20 states have enacted similar legislation in the last decade. However, while residents in Kentucky and Texas can quickly search through comprehensive websites designated for state contract perusal, in Wisconsin only 14 out of 98 state agencies listed on its website, http://sunshine.sundialsc.com, contain even one contract.
Overall, approximately 1,400 contracts have been posted to the website between 2005 and 2010. Of those, about 80 percent came strictly from the Department of Transportation, which appears to be one of the few agencies even attempting full compliance, while only 55 contracts have been posted to the site in 2010.
Most shocking of all, the entire UW System hasn't posted a single contract to the website since its inception because of incompatible software. Considering the System has come under fire just this school year for its $81 million IT contract with Huron Consulting Group and the controversial contract to relocate Brothers Bar and Grill, UW students clearly deserve access to these contracts.
To be fair, UW-Madison's website currently lists some 300 contracts. To put this in perspective, UW System Spokesperson David Giroux said that for the UW System to completely comply with the law, it would have to plug in data for roughly 41,000 contracts.
As justification, Giroux recently said posting to Wisconsin's ""Contract Sunshine"" website was impractical because it required state agencies to manually input data about each contract, to make information like total cost and parties involved easily discernible.
Part of the problem, according to Government Accountability Board Spokesperson Reid Magney, is that the original legislation had no enforcement mechanism whatsoever. Additionally, Magney said that the website—which looks to have been slapped together by someone whose web design skills do not exceed the first five minutes of an HTML tutorial—has gone without an official coordinator for much of its existence.
We believe that UW-Madison students and residents have the right to know how their university and state are spending their tuition and tax dollars. Instead of forcing state agencies to pour resources into data entry, the state should focus on reformatting its centralized website to make it more user-friendly, and in the short term, allow agencies to simply post their contracts to the website.
