State treasurer touts office budget cuts, transparency during re-election bid

Don Stenberg touted his office’s transparency and reduction in spending as two reasons why he should be re-elected state treasurer during a stop last week in Kimball.

Stenberg, the incumbent, faces two challengers in the race - Democrat Michael J. O’Hara and Libertarian Michael Knebel. Last Wednesday’s stop was part of a five-day tour of the state that saw him visit many towns, from east to west and then back across.

Stenberg has spent four years as the state treasurer. His career spans more than three decades in which he has worked in private practice as an attorney and in various capacities for the state. He has previously spent time as the state’s attorney general, director of the governor’s policy research office and legal counsel to the governor.

The state treasurer’s office has a variety of functions, from returning unclaimed property to handling the “checkbook” and more.

“There’s several functions. One, I guess most obviously, is handle the state’s checkbook, for lack of a better term. Actually, we pay over 95 percent of the bills electronically, but we still kind of refer to the state’s checkbook,” Stenberg said. “I’m the trustee of the Nebraska Educational Savings Trust, which is Nebraska’s college savings plan. I’m responsible for the state’s transparency website, nebraskaspending.gov. You go there and find out how much money, if any, the state paid for publishing in the Kimball newspaper or what they pay state employees, that kind of thing. Also, we do child support collection distribution. Now, if somebody doesn’t pay, we don’t have the authority to deal with that. That’s the county attorney or a private attorney, but they pay us and we pay it out. As my four years as treasurer, it’s been over $1 billion that we’ve taken in and paid out to people, have it coming to them.

“Then returning unclaimed property, that’s one of the things I think we’re better known for, I think…there’s a lot more of that than you think. In four years I’ve returned over $34 million to 54,000 Nebraskans. We’ve got $135 million on hand for about 350,000 Nebraskans or former Nebraskans. Some of those are people who are deceased, so it would go to their heirs. That’s kind of, in a nutshell, the various functions that we have there.”

One thing Stenberg has done is reduce the state treasurer’s office budget by over 14 percent since he took over.

“One of the things taxpayers appreciate about what I’ve done is substantially cut the treasurer’s office budget since I’ve taken office,” he said. “Shortly after I was elected, I asked the governor and the legislature to cut the budget in the treasurer’s office by 13 percent, and they did that. Two years later, I asked for another 1.2 percent budget cut, and I did that. Over four years, that’s about $2.8 million of spending reduction in the state treasurer’s office. Just a couple weeks ago we had to submit our budget requests for the coming two years, and I asked for zero increase. We’re running our office on a very cost-effective basis. As technology improves, we’re able to do the same job for less cost.”

Another change has been a law that makes state contracts public, Stenberg said.

“I worked on a law that got passed a year and a half ago that went into effect this July that makes every state contract available online, so you can go in and find a state contract with whoever and see what it says,” he said.

The incumbent said his record of leadership is why he should be returned to office.

“I think because I have a proven record of cost-effective management of the state treasurer’s office,” he said. “We’ve returned large amounts of unclaimed property, we’ve added a lot of accounts to our college savings plan, we’ve raised the grade on our transparency website from a D to a B, so, based on the record I’ve compiled as state treasurer.”