Randal Edgar’s Providence Journal front-page article on the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Spotlight on Spending report (which is much better than the article featured on the paper’s Web site, last night) raises another small-dollar item from another year that we used as an example:

Preserve Rhode Island questioned the assertion that a $3,000 Certified Local Government Grant to the town of Bristol to “produce a smart-phone application to guide visitors” through the town’s historic areas had led to downloads by only about 100 people.

“The Bristol Walking Tour project is only in the planning stage; no walking tour smart-phone application has been developed,” the group said.

As we wrote in the introduction to the report, government spending is so massive and difficult to trace that it would be impossible for interested citizens to assess it without a little margin for error, and in this case, we may have been incorrect to think that the Bristol community app featuring a “historic walking tour” released at the end of the 2013 fiscal year was the Bristol community app featuring a “historic walking tour” for which taxpayers paid during the 2013 fiscal year.

If it was an error, though, I wish we had caught it mostly because the reality serves our point even better, for three reasons:

1. We paid $3,000 in FY13 for an app, and as we approach the end of FY14 (and the tourist season), it isn’t even in development, yet, but still in planning?  I’d say that’s clearly “non-essential spending.”
2. If the app that we highlighted in the report was entirely funded by private organizations, why is the government (much less the state government) getting involved at all (much less to produce a duplicate product)?
3. As phrased, Preserve RI was contesting our characterization of the number of users of the app.  Does anybody really think that an app produced by the government and with a much narrower scope than the one we described would actually do better?