Mayor Richard M. Daley isn’t releasing his “shovel-ready, wish-list” of projects he wants funded with the swelling economic stimulus package because, well, it’s “controversial.”

The unspoken premise being that the more controversial something is, the less right the public has to know about it.

As the Chicago Tribune quoted Daley: “Yes, we do, we have our list, we’ve been talking to people. We did not put that out publicly because once you start putting it out publicly, you know, the newspapers, the media is going to be ripping it apart.”

You mean instead of rubber-stamping them, mayor, like your City Council does?

“It’s very controversial,” he continued. “Yes, we have ready projects from the Board of Education to the City Colleges to the Park District to the CTA and the city of Chicago. Oh, yes. Us and New York decided not to do that. We thought we could go directly into the federal bureaucracies and the different departments.”

Two points to be made here:

• New York City at least gives us an inkling of how it would spend much of its expected $3.4 billion in stimulus money: Medicaid and education.

• By skipping the Legislature and going directly to the “federal bureaucracies and the different departments,” Daley isn’t just stiffing the public but his fellow politicians as well. Daley can’t take the chance that some pol he doesn’t control might suggest that something be added to or removed from Daley’s hush-hush list.

When Daley later was asked why he couldn’t be more “transparent” he said, “Read some of your newspapers. Heh, heh.”

Funny thing, Daley has turned his list into a government secret just as the new Obama administration is spinning its own baloney about “transparency.” Can we count on the Obama administration, once it gets Daley’s list, telling us what’s on it? If the administration doesn’t, I’d say that President Barack Obama has failed a major test of one of his campaign promises.

You might say he’s already failed because transparency can hardly be the property of  a $1.2-trillion (including debt service), 647-page spending bill that Obama and Democrats are trying to shove through Congress in a record couple of weeks. This is a bill that’s twice the cost of the Vietnam War or the Iraq War. Yet, there’s no time for committee hearings, no time to let the public dissect it. No time for reflection. Just get it done.

The TARP financial rescue package was rushed through Congress without time to ask such fundamental questions as who’s getting the money and what for, and now, just a few months later, everyone is regretting the haste and lack of transparency of it all. Count on remorse setting back in once the stimulus money starts flowing. It is a fearsome thing to watch, this nearly total absence of public discussion of who decides who gets the stimulus money and for what purpose.

Take Chicago’s projects. Or not, because we don’t know what they are. Let’s say Illinois will get $500 million for transportation projects. Should it go for Chicago pothole repair or suburban intersection improvements? CTA track repairs or more Metra rolling stock? New CTA buses or the incomplete Elgin-O’Hare Expressway? O’Hare Airport expansion or the long-delayed south suburban airport?

This will be the biggest wad of money heading our way, ever. Will it end up in the hands of the politically connected, pay-to-play contractors and consultants? You know that it will. The potential for graft and corruption is colossal, beyond anything ever imagined, way beyond what has gone before. The public and media apathy about the approaching hurricane is horrifying.

Of course Daley doesn’t want anyone to see his wish list. How can he keep absolute control over the coming bonanza if some of his vassals are allowed even a tiny peek? When he says he has “been talking to people” about what goes onto the list, we can guess who they are: insiders and goniffs. In Daley’s perfect world, the rest of us—the people who will be paying for all this—will get to see the list after the money has been doled out, the contractors picked and the earthmoving starts, probably on some midnight.

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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer Editorial Board