Just over a month ago, Chip Flowers was sworn in at the Treasurer of the State of Delaware. Since that time, he has started fulfilling campaign promises. He has a way to go, but hey, it’s been a month.
One of his suggestions was a regular report of Delaware’s economic situation. The idea was to make the Treasurer’s office a watchdog of local economic indices to provide guidance to officials and the public. On February 3rd, the first edition of this report was issued. Personally, I’d rather the report be issued in HTML than in PDF format, but they don’t ask me. But if you look at the link, the report (The Delaware Economic Index) is an excellent thumbnail sketch of where the state is economically and how we are progressing in our recovery.
This week, Flowers released a document called The Report on the Delaware State Treasury. Again, the damn thing is a PDF, but I can hope that it gets better. I do find it a bit irksome that the document refers to “the People” like some sort of bizarre cult. Perhaps Chip is trying to get in good with the Tea Partiers (pssst.. Chip, you got no shot with those people).
Anyway, the document is a bit of a “good news, bad news” report detailing the baseline of the Treasurer’s office. The good news is that the employees are good, the revenue is good, the AAA bond rating is good. The bad news is that Chip wants a couple of big honkin’ flat screens to have CNBC running 24×7 to monitor the markets (currently, they just have a single analog TV with rabbit ears. So in Dover, that means that you can only watch Springer and Maury Povich). Also, the 23 people that work for the Treasurer, while great people, are too few in number. It’ll be interesting to see where that issue goes with the Legislature.
Oddly, there is a section called “Security” that has been redacted because of the sensitive nature of it. The full report is being made available to the legislature. But since it appears in the “bad news” section, I can only assume that it means that Charles Potter still has a key to the building.
Finally, the document ends with a list of stuff that Flowers wants to accomplish as Treasurer and the status of those bullet points. I’ll be interested to see how these progress as his term rolls on.
Also, a little birdie has told me that there are some other things afoot with Chip. Apparently, he has scheduled a meeting with the Public Integrity Commission in March to discuss how to properly ensure that he doesn’t violate any public trusts when talking to clients that work with his law firm. I guess it’s good to get ahead of these things and try to draw bright lines that can’t be crossed.