Cooper urges more county transparency

Colorado trip provides impetus for outreach

Friday, Sept. 11, 2009

"Some of the counties across the nation are moving to an open and transparent government where everything is open; it's all online," Cooper explained. "[The representatives] said it has really helped them with the general public perception that public officials were always hiding and doing things behind closed doors.

"They said the more they opened up — once it was all put together — the general public understands that you have to meet for land deals, businesses locating, personnel; you can't have those types of things in the open public. What they don't understand is why [counties] can't make available … resources people would most likely have to fight with the government to get when it's all public information."

Cooper said Jefferson County dedicated four people to putting all of its available information online over the course of a month. Once the tough part was over, only one person was needed to plug in the daily changes to information.

A call to Jefferson County's public information office was not returned, but there is a link to Transparent Jeffco on the county's Web site — www.co.jefferson.co.us — which details how the initiative works.

Charles County has been offering BoardDocs online for the past two and a half years, which lists the commissioners' agendas and any presentations or documents used during their meetings.

Staffers are able to process open records requests, Cooper said, but the labor and costs attached to those requests add up.

But one critic, Nanjemoy activist Richard Campbell, a candidate for the District 2 commissioner seat, isn't buying Cooper's claim that the county government is dedicated to transparency. He said Cooper's newfound dedication merely "… helps express to Charles County citizens why there's a need for more closed sessions. … I took from it [the commissioners] will be better prepared as to why they do business the way they do business."

But providing support to be as transparent as these counties claim is not necessarily a quick and simple fix.

"You have to deal with the interface: What is it going to look like and how can constituents get easily into the data?" said Richard Aldridge, director of fiscal and administrative services IT administration. "We have many servers, and sometimes data that [need to be] posted [go] across servers and across departments."

That's not to say the county hasn't already made huge strides in the right direction, according to Aldridge, Charles County was the first county in the state to put election results online 10 years ago, and then proceeded to share how to do it with neighboring jurisdictions, Aldridge said.

The county was also one of the first to post property taxes on its Web site, allowing residents to see their data and payments in real time. And for the seventh year in a row, Charles County has been ranked in the top spot for the annual Digital Counties Survey conducted by the Center for Digital Government and the National Association of Counties.

"From the very beginning transparency of government is something we took seriously," said Commissioner Reuben B. Collins II (D). "It's been an ongoing process in terms of how as a government we can make ourselves more accessible as possible and it's a commitment that we've made and I'm certainly interested in learning what other jurisdictions are doing; it's certainly worth of a review."

"What we do is the people's work, so it should be open to the public what we're doing," Commissioner Samuel N. Graves Jr. (D) said.

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