By Julia Tylor
Cronkite News
GLENDALE – Those curious about how much it cost this city to put up walking maps downtown or what kind of electricity bills the cemeteries run up can find out with just a few clicks of a mouse.
With a state law requiring cities to be more transparent about how they spend money, Glendale decided to go beyond the bare minimum, according to Diana Bundschuh, the city’s deputy chief information technology officer.
The result: Follow Your Money, a website launched last year that lets users research down to individual transactions.
“We spent a lot of time in thinking about how many clicks did it take for them to get their information, … without them having to know about the city of Glendale’s accounting system and how we do accounting,” Bundschuh said.
A 2010 law requires cities as of Jan. 1, 2013, to post records online of all expenditures greater than $5,000. It applies to municipalities with populations greater than 2,500.
A municipality has two options: launching its own spending transparency database or posting a comprehensive annual financial report (CAFR) that has been awarded an excellence in financial reporting designation by the Government Finance Officers Association. For fiscal 2009, the last year for which results were available, 37 Arizona municipalities received the award.
The implementation of Arizona OpenBooks, the state-level spending transparency database, opened a third possibility of cities submitting their data to the state database, said Tom Belshe, deputy director of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns.
