Part of the mission for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s joint online transparency app with the Tiverton Taxpayers Association — beyond the first-order goal of increased transparency — is to help people to learn how to use the tools that are already available to them.

To that end, in my role as the editor of TivertonFactCheck.org (on my volunteer time with the Association) I’ll be offering brief tips and tutorials.  My first one is on the use of payroll data in conjunction with the state campaign finance search:

Selecting Tiverton 1st and then viewing its “Amendment of Organization” shows who was in charge of the group at the time it was filed and also which candidates the group worked to elect.  Notably most of the people on the Tiverton 1st list are on the Town Council, and all three of the endorsed school committee candidates won, which is a majority on that committee. …

In this case, two of the three people listed as “Co-coordinator/chair” [of Tiverton 1st] show up as employees of the school department.  Gloria Crist was already receiving a little over $1,813 per year as a drama coach.  More significantly, soon after her endorsed candidates won a majority of the school committee, Linda Larsen was appointed by the school department as the School to Career Coordinator, which paid her $18,988 in fiscal year 2014.

The lessons aren’t all local, of course.  Government is interconnected and incestuous from one tier to the next, so it makes sense that political opportunism would cross the breach, too.  I also look at the Tiverton Political Action Committee for Education, which is just the local PAC for the teachers’ union:

In fiscal year 2012, Mr. Marx was the second-highest-paid teacher in Tiverton, making $91,394.  That might help explain why he became the treasurer of a group that works to elect specific candidates to government offices. The new treasurer was Amy Mullen.  Mullen isn’t making Marx money (yet), but $73,521 in fiscal year 2014 is quite a bit of incentive.

Just imagine if every town’s financial information were easily accessible to everybody in the state and a significant number of people understood how to use it to connect dots!