This bit of information comes from something called the Sunshine Review‘s SunshineOnline webpage – The My Government Website Project. This is a wiki-based project where information is available on government WEBSITE transparency for states but including county, city and school districts. It is a work in progress, with more data coming in all the time. It encourages citizen participation by having citizens do the evaluations (available on their website). It is a fairly simple process and is fully explained. Although they place the State of Virginia within the top 10 states for open government, DO NOT assume that status holds for all jurisdictions within the state.
Interesting information about Virginia Counties includes based upon this sites evaluative criteria:
Only 3 counties do not maintain an official website: Craig, Lee, and Mecklenburg.
Of the 95 counties and 39 city counties (which are included at this source)
Budgets: 35 post full, 32 post partial, and 25 post no information
Public Meetings Notices: 42 include all notices of public meetings, 42 provide partial information, and 8 provided no information.
Information on elected and administrative officials: 74 provide all information on both sets of officials; 14 provided only partial information on elected officials, and 17 only partial on administrative officials. Only 1 county provided neither.
Permits and zoninginformation: 77 provided all, 5 provided partial, and 10 provided none.
Audits: 38 provided all information, 10 provided partial, and 44 provided none.
Contract with county vendors: 13 provided full information, 26 provided partial, and 53 provided none.
Disclosure on taxpayer-funding lobbying membership: 19 provided full information, 0 provided partial, and 73 provided no such information.
How to request public records (FOIA): 6 provided full information, 12 provided partial, and 74 provided none.
Tax information: 66 provided all, 9 provided partial information, 17 provided none.
A table providing information on each individual county for the above parameters is available at one of their links. A quick look and I saw that the data might not be current. One of the recent changes to Virginia State Law is that jurisdictions with a website are now required to post budgets online. If you live in or work for one of these jurisdictions, it may be worth the effort to go to the site where you can update information. As I noted previously, this is a work in progress and is being updated. YOU can be a part of the process.
All of these are based on those documents which are part of the public’s right to know and are covered under the FOIA. If you wish access to any of these documents, a FOIA request should provide it for you. Given that each FOIA request cost taxpayer time and money to receive, research, and produce the request, and the fact that most jurisdictions barely have the staff to handle routine business, it would seem that more jurisdictions would put forth a dedicated effort to provide these documents on their websites, saving money and reducing staff workloads for other projects.
They do not provide information on towns in Virginia, but I have a very reliable source indicating that there is something similar being developed for the Towns of Christiansburg as well. However, would it be needed at all if the State Legislature would simply develop standards that denote these basic documents be posted on all websites. One little statute would end the problem, save money, and free up worker time.
