Post info and prosper

Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing. And sometimes it's easier than you might think.

Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing.

And sometimes it's easier than you might think.

Last week The Press did an experiment. Knowing that Rep. Phil Hart has been pushing for legislation that would require public schools to post their expenses online - and getting plenty of pushback from educators worried about the time and expense this might require - we decided to give the process a test.

We took a pile of some 150 pages of checkbook registers from Lake City Development Corp., Coeur d'Alene's urban renewal agency. The agency charged us for the processing and copying but provided us a neat stack of pages.

We then turned those pages, representing about seven years of records, over to The Press online department with instructions to keep track of the time and other resources needed to transfer all that data to something our readers could closely examine at cdapress.com.

Here's what it took:

TIME: About 11 hours total, but that was electronically manipulating every page for maximum legibility (a process that took two to three minutes per page). Producing simple PDFs of everything would have taken an estimated 3 hours instead.

EQUIPMENT: One copy machine with auto feeder and incoming fax number, Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop software, and one normal laptop computer.

Having performed this test, we don't understand claims that the only way schools can comply with this simple request would be through racking up countless employee hours and incurring astronomical expense, especially if the records were posted each month.

What we do understand is that posting checkbook expenditures online may encourage more questions from constituents, which in turn could require more time and expense to answer. But that worry can be largely wiped out by ensuring that thorough records are kept in the first place. Adding a simple memo line to each entry will answer most questions directly.

So what did we conclude from our experiment? It's so easy and so cheap, virtually any public entity can do it - and should, because this is not an "extra" service somebody's providing to constituents. This level of accountability is literally as fundamental as government can get.

Because it's so cheap and easy, we encourage all public entities to post their financial records online as clearly and quickly as possible. Those who choose not to might as well declare that they have little regard for their constituents or something to hide. Or both.