LITTLE ROCK — A few months after Arkansas received a failing grade for Internet access to state government-spending information, Arkansas’ database for expenditures is to go live Sunday.
The website is transparency.arkansas.gov.
Act 303 of 2011 directed the Department of Finance and Administration to set up the website to track the roughly $24 billion-a-year state budget.
Department officials built “pillars that mirror those requirements in the law - expenditures, revenues, employees’ salaries, bonded indebtedness and contracts - and then we broke out payments to cities and counties separate from expenditures, just so it would be easier for the average person to find those things,” said Paul Louthian, the state’s accounting administrator.
He said state employees’ budgeted annual salaries will become available on the site starting Sunday, and that information will be updated once a month.
The other information required to be posted on the site - except for bonded indebtedness - will be available starting July 6, and bonded debt information probably will be available on the site starting in mid-September, Louthian told reporters Wednesday.
During a demonstration of the site at the Finance Department, Susan Smith typed “history” into a yellow box in the middle of the website to conduct a search.
Among the information that shows up, she said, “We would know the number of the people who work for the History Commission ... [or] even vendors that have ‘history’ in their title.”
Smith said one screen shows the History Commission’s revenue, expenses, debt, payments to cities and counties, top 10 sources of revenue, top 10 expenditure types and top 10 contracts.
“As you keep going getting different levels of detail, you can find exactly what they have spent money on,” she said.
Smith said “contracts will be a very interesting place for people to browse and spend time.” For example, she said, she checked an office supply contract withOffice Depot, and she was able to access a PDF of the contract document as well as other information.
Louthian said he expects employees’ salaries and vendor contracts to be searched the most on the website.
He said the Legislature appropriated $558,000 and added two positions to the Arkansas Administrative Statewide Information System Support Center to help get the project online, and the money has been spent and two employees hired for salaries of about $60,000 a year each.
The Legislature appropriated about $250,000 for the ongoing costs of the project during the next fiscal year, Louthian said.
Lt. Gov. Mark Darr, who in 2010 campaigned to create an online database, said state officials have done “a tremendous job” on the project.
“It is very user-friendly, because I don’t consider myself a technological genius, and I think I can work myself through that,” he said.
Darr said Arkansas is the first state “to have mobile capability, so you will be able to look at it on your smart phone.”
He said he pushed for the project so the public can better know where its money is spent, and to hold the state’s elected officials and state employees accountable for spending taxpayers’ money.
“I think it will cut down on wasteful spending,” he said.
Richard Weiss, director of the Department of Finance and Administration, said he doesn’t know what the system’s net effect on state government will be.
“It is going to be in the eye of beholder, I am sure,” he said.
Higher education institutions are on accounting systems other than the rest of state government so their figures won’t be on the new website. But Act 1163 of 2011 requires the higher education institutions to present their information on websites operated by the colleges and universities.
Louthian said state officials plan to put links from the transparency.arkansas.gov website to the higher education institutions’ websites when their websites go live and the links are available to state finance department officials.
Arkansas State University’s site will go live Sunday at webapps.astate.edu/expenditures, ASU System President Chuck Welch said.
ASU officials will post information on the website monthly, so July’s information will be posted during the first week of August, he said.
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s site is expected to go live during the first week of July, UA spokesman John Diamond said.
“Unless something changes over the next few days, the URL is going to be openua. uark.edu,” he said.
University of Arkansas for Medical Science’s site will go live Oct. 1 and will be a page on uams.edu, UAMS spokesman Leslie Taylor said.
“We are going to post [information] quarterly,” she explained.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock “won’t have any information on our page until July business is closed,” UALR spokesman Judy Williams said.
“It should be up in August. After that point, we’ll post monthly figures,” she said.
The University of Central Arkansas is “on target to meet the deadline” of 30 days after the first quarter of fiscal 2013, said Diane Newton, UCA’s vice president for finance and administration.
Forty-six other states already provide online databases of government expenditures with “checkbook-level” detail, and that’s up from 32 states two years ago, according to a report released in March by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s Education Fund based in Boston. The fund is a 501(c)(3) organization that said it works to protect consumers and promote good government.
These state governmentoperated websites allow visitors to view the government’s checkbook - who receives state money, how much and for what purposes - and most of these websites are searchable, making it easier for residents to follow the money and monitor government spending of many sorts, the report said.
Arkansas is one of five states that received a failinggrade when it came to providing online access to information about government spending in the Public Interest Research Group’s Education Fund report. The other four states were Wyoming, Iowa, Montana and Idaho.
Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Texas and West Virginia received “A” grades for establishing user-friendly transparency portals that contain comprehensive information on government expenditures. Among the most distinctive features of these websites is the ability to compare state expenditures over time.
Darr said he hopes the new site “is a huge step toward that A.”
Louthian said state officials certainly won’t get “an F” next year.
The Public Interest Research Group’s Education Fund wants information from the spending of cities and counties to be part of the state’s website and “we don’t have access to that type of information,” he said.
But Louthian said, “I think the grading for the state’s website itself will be very good.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 06/28/2012