First Posted: 3/18/2015
COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio has moved from close to the worst in the nation to the top of a list in a watchdog group’s ranking of transparency in government spending.
An annual U.S. Public Interest Research Group report released Wednesday credited Ohio’s newly earned first-place ranking to an online checkbook developed and launched last year by Treasurer Josh Mandel. The Republican treasurer’s website, OhioCheckbook.com, features interactive, Google-style searches of more than $408 billion in state spending from 2008 to 2014.
The announcement came during Sunshine Week, an annual event to draw attention to government access issues.
Catherine Turcer, of the government watchdog group Common Cause, said OhioCheckbook.com is one of several “beacons of hope” for government access in Ohio right now — but things are far from perfect in government as a whole.
“At the same time as there seems to be better auditing and better access to information, individual records that are needed seem to take longer than they used to and sometimes you’re just given the run-around,” she said.
Mandel, a former U.S. Senate candidate, aimed to top U.S. PIRG’s list with his effort. He asked his staff to make a site better than those of the three states — Indiana, Oregon and Florida — that topped the group’s report last year. Ohio received a D-minus and scored 46th last year.
“The premise is to let people know how their money’s being spent,” he said.
He plans a stringent effort this spring to invite cities, counties, school boards, library boards and other public entities to add their spending totals to the state site free of charge. Mandel also continues to push legislation that would require future state treasurers to keep the checkbook online now that it’s developed.
U.S. PIRG’s Phineas Baxandall said some of the most user-friendly features of the site aren’t reflected in the group’s 5-year-old scoring system because they’ve never been seen before. He specifically noted how the Google-style searching suggests terms as you type.
“That’s particularly useful when searching a government bureaucracy because most normal citizens don’t know exactly what it is they’re looking for, what the options are,” he said.
Baxandall called Ohio a “perennial basement-dweller” in the group’s rankings of online access to government-spending data. He said the group has found no partisan pattern in its transparency rankings.
