Members of the city's Redevelopment Commission agreed on Thursday to give another $85,000 to INVin, this on top of $200,000 the group committed to that downtown-development organization late last year.
The RDC was wrong back then, just as it was wrong this past week to give INVin even more money.
Our problem is not so much with how the money is to be spent, which in this case is for a dressed-up parking lot at the corner of Sixth and Main streets that, we're told, will make it easier for INVin to find a buyer for the New Moon Theater.
No, our concern is that the RDC has twice now given tax dollars to INVin without INVin first coming clean with full disclosure as to the identity (or even financial wherewithal) of this mysterious stranger who allegedly pledged $100,000 if $300,000 in public money was first given to INVin.
We've stated this before but it apparently bears repeating: no tax dollars should ever be committed without full disclosure of the names and backgrounds of all those involved in their request.
It doesn't matter how appealing the proposed project may prove to be, without that transparency no deal should be struck.
The end does not justify the means when it comes to doling out tax dollars, especially when those means go against the very foundation of good government which, as the state auditor reminded us on Thursday afternoon, is transparency.
When RDC members on Thursday morning did make a tepid request about that promised $100,000, they were more or less told to go suck an egg.
So not only don't they know who all they're partnering with, they don't even know whether that individual (whomever he or she may be) can keep up his or her end of the deal.
Members of the Redevelopment Commission are not elected but appointed, but that doesn't mean they aren't to be held accountable for how the tax dollars placed at their disposal are dispensed.
When tax dollars are placed in your charge, regardless of whether you're elected or appointed to your office, the same rules apply — at least they should apply.
And members of the commission are honorable people, certainly civic-minded, which makes their unfortunate collective misstep here in conspiring with INVin to keep taxpayers in the dark all the more frustrating.
This troublesome lack of faith in government that's developed since the financial crisis feeds on deals such as this one between the RDC and INVin.
For the public, this is just more evidence of how “insiders” get to sidestep the rules to access public money, that government, even on the local level, favors the well-connected few.
We in the newspaper business believe in transparency in government; we've over the years led the fights to secure legislation mandating openness in government, codifying “the public's right to know” into black and white, hard and fast laws.
To us in the newspaper business transparency isn't just a word.
When it comes to government, transparency has meaning: that the conducting of the public's business will be done in the open, with full disclosure of all those involved, with the guarantee that nothing is hidden from the public.
So we naturally are unnerved when we see government on any level that in operation is more opaque than transparent, when secrecy is accepted and openness discarded as a first prerequisite of conducting the public's business.