Transparency tool shows public the bottom line

The cost of a lunch meeting town officials had with University of Florida consultants in November at Lazy Lobster: $122.93.

The cost of electricity for the town for the first three months of the current fiscal year: $52,329.

The cost of overtime in the current fiscal year: $41,001.

The cost of obtaining all that information with the click of a mouse: priceless.

Thanks to the town’s new fiscal transparency tool on its website, longboatkey.org, budget hawks can scrutinize town spending more easily. Any user can view the date, type of information, vendor and total amount of each transaction. The information becomes available immediately after the town’s Finance Department posts an item to an account.

Details about town spending — from major capital improvement projects and payroll all the way down to the cost of office supplies — have always been public record, but until recently, you would have had to access it through a public records request.

“People want a lot of information,” said Kathi Pletzke, the town’s Management Information Systems (MIS) director. “In the past, the Finance Department would have to stop what they were doing, gather the information and finally give the information in paper format.”

Users can also export any data set to a Word, Excel, CSV or PDF file for further examination.

The detailed information about each transaction became available in December, expanding on a budget module that went live in February 2014 that uses fiscal data to feed directly from the Finance Department’s database to display revenue and expenses to the public. The town won a 2013-14 Solutions Award from the Public Technology Institute in the Web management and e-government category for the tool in May.

The other four winning municipalities were the much larger communities of San Francisco, Miami-Dade County, Evansville, Ind., and Mesa, Ariz.

So, why is tiny Longboat Key a leader in fiscal transparency?

“It’s because we have educated, active citizens who wanted to be involved and had difficulty getting the information,” Pletzke said.

The town has placed information such as building permits and elevation certificates online for the public to view for several years. The IT Department hopes to eventually show crime data on the town’s website, possibly using a map, and is open to suggestions about other information it could provide to the public.

“This is a town that’s built on innovation,” said Barry Gaines, the town’s information technology specialist. “These people were successful because they were willing to take that extra step.”

Pletzke is already hearing from officials in other municipalities who are interested in developing similar tools. Eventually, she would like the town to market and sell the software it develops.

Commissioner Phill Younger, who studies the town’s budget in depth, said the town’s accounting technology and procedures still need work, but he praised the fiscal transparency work.

““It’s a vast improvement,” Younger said. “I can pull the information up and manipulate it rapidly.”

How to use the Tool
• Visit the town’s website, longboatkey.org, and click on “view” at the bottom of the “How do I…?” tab at the home page’s rightmost side. Select “town budget.”

• View spending totals for each category from the past five fiscal years and spending for the current fiscal year, plus the variance from the budgeted amount for the current year, on the account code summary page.

• Click on the “$” sign under “PMTS” to view details of transactions for each category for the current fiscal year.

• Click on “export data” to export any set of data to a Word, Excel, CSV or PDF file.