Mark Gordon

In his first-ever press conference as governor-elect, Mark Gordon made a pledge to his new constituency to make fiscal transparency his No. 1 priority in his first year in office.

A little more than a year later, one of the biggest steps toward accomplishing that has been checked off the list.

On Nov. 22, Gordon’s office announced the launch of Wyoming Sense, described as a budget transparency website offering residents an easy way to navigate his state budget plan.

“Wyoming Sense will provide Wyoming citizens insight and clarity to our budgeting process, which can sometimes be confusing,” Gordon said in a statement. “This initiative continues my efforts to increase transparency of our state government. It makes sense for Wyoming’s citizens to know and understand who provides Wyoming’s income, and how taxpayer dollars are being spent.”

State Auditor Kristi Racines launched a different website in June, WyoOpen.gov, that’s dedicated exclusively to documenting the state’s expenditures.

Simply stated, Wyoming Sense allows visitors to take a magnifying glass to every dollar in the budget, allowing citizens the ability to learn exactly how the state pays its bills by breaking down spending in an easy-to-understand format.

The state’s Department of Corrections, for example, gets $273 million out of its $289 million budget from the state’s general fund, with the remaining 6 percent of its budget coming from a mix of federal and other sources. That fact can be quickly gleaned from the governor’s budget book.  What the budget book does not capture, however, is precisely how those funds are spent. For example, clicking on the Department of Corrections page on Wyoming Sense will bring you to a page describing the primary functions of the department as well as its number of employees, its obligations (i.e. inmate counts) and other information to help the curious understand precisely where their money is going.

A more complicated example is the Wyoming Department of Education, whose $326 million budget includes just $18.9 million from the state’s general fund, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars available for the University of Wyoming and the state’s community colleges — a fact Wyoming Sense helps illustrate with graphics that can quickly break down the share of funds given to each department and narratives for how that money is spent.

Where the site does fall short is moving beyond the macro levels of funding. For example, of education department funding, 97 percent of that budget directly flows to schools and other education providers while the other 3 percent funds the administration and oversight of various state and federal programs that support those efforts. However, the site does not break down that 97 percent or that 3 percent — leaving it up to individuals to research those facts themselves using the departments’ individual budget requests available through the Division of Administration and Budget. Those can be dozens of pages long.

While the new website conquers the difficulty of deciphering the thousands of numbers that make up the budget, it will also help Wyomingites to avoid the headache of tracking changing allocations of spending as the Legislature dukes it out with the governor over the winter.

One of the most difficult things to do as the state’s two-year budget is hammered out, is keeping track of the give-and-take between different departments as bills are passed and funding requests are either approved or denied by members of the Joint Appropriations Committee, whose attitudes toward spending can often conflict with the governor and one another.

The Wyoming Sense website will — according to a news release — be updated to reflect any budget changes approved by the Wyoming Legislature during the heat of the 2020 budget session.

Early indications show that might happen more often than expected. Though the governor’s recommended budget includes few cuts to services, he proposed slashing capital construction funding by more than a third while denying a significant amount of funding requested by the University of Wyoming — an allocation the school is likely to push back on.

The battle lines will likely come into cleaner focus this month, when the Joint Appropriations Committee will meet with the governor to discuss specific numbers ahead of the 2020 legislative session. The weeklong meeting began Monday in the state Capitol.

The 2020 budget session gavels in on Feb. 10 and is scheduled to run through March 12.