Post government finances daily to the Internet to reduce waste and fraud.

By Steve P. Mozena

All Carson government finances, including all income and expenditure, should be posted to the City's website every day. This will eliminate corruption and restore people's trust in the City.

If elected as your Carson Councilmember, I will bring to the City a way of doing the impossible: saving money in these days of sharp budget cuts while at the same time maintaining and improving city services for all residents. My plan will also ensure fiscal honesty and accountability in city government, and help to restore residents' eroding faith in the honesty of City Hall.

The idea is a simple one, yet I believe it would be extremely effective. I have been promoting it since 2000.

This is my proposal: Post all the city government finances to the Internet on a daily basis. I believe this would effectively root out waste, corruption and fraud. It would bring all the city's financial dealings into the clear light of day.

City residents would be able to see at a glance how much revenue the city generates, and how it is spent, from the biggest expenditures down to the smallest. People would be able to find out, for example, how much the city receives from those one-armed bandits, the parking meters, as well as the dreaded parking ticket, and how this revenue is spent.

Posting the finances would also, I believe, prove extremely popular with you, the voters and taxpayers, who are sick of the misuse of taxpayers' money at all levels of government, and the secretive systems that make such abuse possible.

In the Post the Finances system, each city department would be responsible for posting its finances to its section of the city website. My website, http://www.postthefinances.com gives more details of the system, and of my efforts in promoting it.

What Post the Finances needs is a visionary leader who is prepared to break out of the pack mentality and initiate a bold new system that will eventually take all government accounting, from city to state and federal levels, into the twenty-first century.

I am that leader.

I am certain I can do this.

The logic behind it is irrefutable: government money is taxpayers' money, so every taxpayer has a right to see, in detail, how that money is used. Up until recent years, such a goal has been impractical, but with the coming of the Internet and the leaps in information technology that have taken place in the last few years, what was formerly impossible is now easily possible.

So why not vote for me as your Carson Councilmember, so I can enact Post the Finances right now?

Sincerely,

Steve Mozena Candidate for Carson Council