The new Senate websites that were unveiled with great fanfare today, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and will cost millions more to maintain.
Senator Smith has hired a new staff with a public payroll of at least a half a million dollars a year to give individual Senators and the public little more than they had with the previous Senate web sites that were designed and maintained by an outside vendor for $60,000 a year.
Those sites, which were state-of-the-art, were just recognized as being among the top government web sites in the world (see link below), but I guess being good is no substitute for being more expensive in the eyes of Democrats.
Senator Smith says the new web sites are part of his plan to encourage government transparency and openness, which is ironic given that he just shut the public out of secret, closed-door discussions on the state budget and the MTA bailout.
At least the new websites will give New Yorkers another opportunity to vent their anger at Senate Democrats for raising their taxes by $10.5 billion, taking away their property tax rebates and enacting a new payroll tax that will cost jobs and result in more property tax hikes.
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