LETTER: Did you ever wonder who's getting all those state grants?

Where do your taxes go? Who is getting government grants? The information should be available to anyone, to keep government transparent and accountable.

On Sept. 14, 2015, 10 state legislators (I was one) requested that seven state agencies provide the names of all their grant recipients and the dollar amount of each grant. The agencies were Department of Environmental Quality; Department of Labor and Industry; Department of Military Affairs; Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Department of Administration; Department of Public Health and Human Services; and Department of Justice.

We legislators, who are responsible for setting state policies and for following up on their results, have been stonewalled by all of those agencies that are under Gov. Bullock’s control. Only one agency gave the information. That was the Department of Justice, an agency headed by a directly elected official, the attorney general. Six executive branch agencies that answer directly to the governor did not even acknowledge receipt of our request. Did Gov. Bullock instruct agency heads to ignore our request? What are they hiding? Are grants “dark money”? Why can’t we know what our government is doing? Shouldn’t we be able to get the information?

Taxpayers expect government to use their funds properly. If we can’t even identify the things our funds are spent on, how can we know that they are spent right?

Call Gov. Bullock’s office and tell him you expect transparency on grants.

—Tom Burnett, Bozeman