Republic Free Choice

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• SF 104 Referendum
• Ideology of the Common Core

To give citizens a way to report corporate welfare, state Senator Cale Case proposed a “Government Competition” bill. Once it passed last year, the bill was supposed to create a state-run website where citizens and businesses could report corporate welfare, or when government agencies unfairly competed with the private sector.

“You know unfair, unconstitutional, and unnecessary government provision of services that can be performed by the private sector is a huge issue for me,” Case said in an email. “…Right now it would appear that the state government has a free ride to engage in such private-sector-based things as: loaning money, building roads, student housing, day care, printing, fueling natural gas vehicles….”

The webpage, called “Transparency in Government,” was online as of June 27, 2012, but filed complaints were still not on the website until early last week. Mark Larson of the Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association is among the concerned citizens who have filed complaints.

Larson said he submitted two complaints in September 2012. The first was after the Big Horn County School Board sought to get a new fuel supply for its vehicles. After companies bid on a deal to supply fuel to the school system, the board moved to get its fuel supply from the Wyoming Department of Transportation.  Larson says that WYDOT did not even make a bid, but the two private companies which did make bids, Big Horn Co-Op and Overland Express, were overlooked in the decision.

He said he made a complaint to the Government Competition website on behalf of the private petroleum industry and received no response. Furthermore, he said his complaint never even made it onto the website.

Larson said he submitted his second complaint to the Government Competition site shortly thereafter, when Sublette County School District 1 began selling compressed natural gas to the public. He said it is a competition to his industry, being financed in part by tax dollars. The Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association sued the school district after Larson said he filed another complaint, and didn’t see it go up on the website either.

On January 11, 2013, over six months after the website’s creation, Senator Case received a letter explaining the problem from Flint Waters, the State Chief Information Officer for the Department of Enterprise Technology Services, saying “there was a limited budget.”

“Last week, we learned the webpage was not retaining submitted information,” the letter reads. “We have conducted tests and have not been able to replicate the problem.”

The letter continues by stating that the website has been given a new email notification system, which will alert Department of Administration and Information employees whenever there is a submitted complaint.

It will be impossible to know whether the website is working properly until more people submit complaints. As of late last week, a single complaint showed up on the website. However, past complaints have not yet appeared. Both of Larson’s complaints are still missing from the webpage. Larson said he supported the Government Competition bill at first, but has come to question its success.

“If complaints can’t be read by citizens and the state, it’s virtually a useless process,” Larson said. “I also think it’s an extremely difficult website to navigate.”

The website’s performance so far can hardly be considered to be up to par.  This speaks volumes about government inefficiency—it cannot even put up a website properly, let alone compete fairly with the private sector.