Transparency report card (2013)

Sunshine Review, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to state and local government transparency, released their 2013 Transparency Report Card grading every state and the largest counties, cities and school districts within each state on the availability of information on government websites. Government websites were graded “A” to “F” measuring available content available against a checklist of information all governments should provide to citizens.

“Transparency empowers citizens,” said Michael Barnhart, President of Sunshine Review. “Citizens are entitled to crucial information on how the public business is conducted and how public money is spent. Without this information, voters cannot hold government accountable. Without transparency accountability is impossible."

Among the findings in the report:

• State websites outperformed local websites with 26 percent scoring in the “A” range, and 60 percent scoring a “B” or above.
• Whereas 28 percent of counties scored a “B” or above and 44 percent of cities scoring a “B” or above.
• School districts had the most dismal grades with only 20 percent of school districts scoring a “B” or above.
• A larger majority of states failed to receive “A” because of their failure to proactively disclosing lobbying data, disclosing how to attain public records and ease-of-use for tracking down data.
• The top five best performing states were California, Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington.
• The five worst performing states include: Alabama, Kentucky Mississippi, Nebraska and South Dakota.

In 2008, Sunshine Review first developed it’s 10- Point Transparency Checklist to measure state, county, city and school district websites based on the type of information provided. Grades are granted by editors at Sunshine Review by applying the Checklist to reviewing more than 6,000 government websites for easy to access information on budgets, meetings, lobbying, financial audits, contracts, academic performance, public records and taxes.

“We see exciting progress as citizens and officials recognize the importance of maintaining a transparency website. However, as our report card shows, many state and local municipalities are struggling to provide the information that voters deserve to know,” said Barnhart.

Full report here.

Grades[edit]

Sunshine Review engages in an eight-step process to produce the transparency grades. The first step in the process was developing the 10-point transparency checklist. Three checklists were created for state websites, county websites & city websites, and school district website evaluations (Appendix B). These criteria resulted from a coordinated effort of over 100 pro-transparency organizations, including the Goldwater Institute, the Lucy Burns Institute, the Sunlight Foundation, Open City, Webitects, and the Journalism Department of Columbia College.

Next, Sunshine Review identified the appropriate websites to review, and reviewed the entity according to the appropriate checklist. Sunshine Review associate writers audited each website. Grades reflected the number of points on the checklist for which criteria were completely met. When an entity partially met the criteria, no point was awarded. A point scale determined the letter grade awarded for each fulfilled point. For example, 0-2 qualified for an “F” grade, 3-4 for a “D” grade and so on.

Afterward, Sunshine Review calculated the score for each level of the state’s government by tallying the total points for all the reviewed sites and finding the average. These averages were then compared to the checklist point scale.

Transparency scorecard[edit]

• Correction: On Jan. 29th Sunshine Review recalculated Hawaii's score, which had no impact on the overall grade or ranking, to no longer include city websites.