Oregon has a law on government transparency: SB 2500, passed in 2009. State agencies are required to post a bunch of info, including expenditures, on the state transparency webpage here. For example, Oregon State University spent a fair amount on Legal Services:
What about UO? Well, UO has stopped reporting Legal Services expenditures to the state legislature. We won’t even admit that we’ve stopped reporting – the spreadsheet now just goes from Laundry to Library, as if there’s nothing missing. Orwell would have loved it:
Why would UO try and hide hide these expenditures from the legislature? I could make a public records request and pay Dave Hubin $x to get a redacted copy of our Interim General Counsel’s explanation for this, or I could just wait for Scott Coltrane to fire Doug Park’s sorry ass and replace him with someone with a clue. For the moment, I’ll go with plan B.
Cool stuff in those reports.
– The Athletics Department is admirably transparent. Nichols State for $450k (and Tennessee for $350k!) are there.
– White Stag is now up to $2.6 million.
– OSU spent $1.75 million on legal services, without any contract negotiation blowups. If we applied the same here, it’d be ~1% of our expenses. I doubt it’s that small though.
– In the software sweepstakes, SAS costs more than Wolfram Mathematica.
Nothing too crazy, such as a 3E Strategies expense, that I see.