Fresno County Special District Website Transparency: Seeing Your Dollars At Work Fresno County Civil Grand Jury*

Note: Missing finding numbers detected: F5, F6, F7, F8, F9, F10, F11, F12, F13, F14, F15, F16, F17, F18, F19, F20, F21, F22, F23, F24, F25, F26, F27, F28, F29, F30, F31, F32, F33, F34, F35, F36, F37, F38, F39, F40

Conclusions 2

• CL1 Page 12
  While independent special districts are not required by law to show all items on the "District Transparency Certificate of Excellence" Checklist on their websites, all items on the Checklist do serve an important purpose. If a citizen is paying taxes to a special district, then the ability to see the district's budget and financial audits is crucial to maintaining trust in the district's governing officials and managers. As evidence of their commitment to open government, special districts who did not receive a perfect score would be well-served by an effort to raise their transparency scores. The Grand Jury encourages all special districts to review the "District Transparency Certificate of Excellence" Checklist above (on page 7) and for those that did not achieve a perfect score to be proactive in adding missing transparency items to their websites. The Grand 12
• CL2 Page 13
  Jury also recognizes the hard work, time and expense special districts invest in their public presence, and thank those that continue to work on refining their websites. The following table shows the results of the special districts' hard work stemming from the investigation. Overall Scoring Results Before Interviews After Interviews Number of Districts with Perfect Transparency Score 2 10 Total Transparency Points 340 431 Number of Compliant Districts 18 24 District scores may generate discussion and even disagreement, and it should be noted the process was a subjective review and composite impression rather than a definitive judgment. However, the Grand Jury believes the overall scores are useful benchmarks, and the presence or absence of points is a useful touchstone for discussion of the work individual special districts need to complete. In the end, the goal is to create "Transparency Excellence" on all special district websites, and if information is clear enough that all reviewers agree on a perfect score of 15 there would be no doubt the websites meet public needs. From this investigation, it initially appeared that most Fresno County independent special districts had work to do in improving their website transparency. However, after the Grand Jury spoke to the districts, the special districts all agreed that they could do better and many did the work to make it better today. This work is achievable and we look forward to seeing the results in increasingly transparent special district websites.

No Responses Found 40

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