This article was originally featured on Pantagraph on September 3, 2014.
The city of Bloomington and Mayor Tari Renner deserve a round of applause for their work to make city documents more visible and easier to access for the general public.
Last week, the City Council approved, on a near unanimous vote, an expansion of the city’s website transparency policy that adds to the number of documents posted on the site (www.cityblm.org) and requires they remain posted for five years.
As reported, the ordinance was based on an online transparency checklist used by the Illinois Policy Institute to rank Illinois communities in their disclosure of public information to taxpayers.
The city already had earned the group’s “Sunshine Award” for progress in increasing online openness.
In 2013, Bloomington earned 88.7 points out of 100 from the institute, placing ninth overall for web transparency. The marks were an improvement of 30 points over its first audit score in 2011.
“This ordinance will make it clear that we have a policy commitment to doing this for the long haul,” Renner told The Pantagraph. “We don’t want, frankly, future mayors and councils to go back on this. We want to keep the progress we’ve made forever.”
That’s a promise especially important to media outlets and government watchdog groups that are charged with a “fourth estate” responsibility to ensure open and fair government.
And, frankly, there is no legitimate reason public units of government, including school districts, village boards, airport authorities and other groups can’t do this. Technology is the great equalizer, making it vastly easier to efficiently make public information accessible to citizens. There is no excuse not to be more transparent — other than outdated reasoning that the public doesn’t need to know “everything” that goes on in City Hall.
In January, shortly after word arrived of the institute’s rankings, we noted that McLean County scored 44.4 percent in its 2013 audit and the town of Normal scored 75 percent in its 2011 audit.
The numbers may not accurately reflect a government’s actual transparency, because it may be quite easy to walk in a door and request a document unavailable on a website.
In Bloomington, the new policy takes effect Oct. 1. Information to be posted on the city’s website will include contact information for elected officials and department heads; public meeting information; certain financial reports; employees’ salaries, overtime and benefits information; current union contracts for all bargaining units; local tax information; contracts; and construction and building permits.
And, we urge the city to not stop there. Making it easy for citizens to become informed is a goal that every government body should strive to reach.