Politics & Government

Shelby Township Opens Up Financial Books to Public

All 2010 and proposed 2011 budgetary information has been posted on the homepage of the Shelby Township website.

In an effort to be more transparent, Shelby Township has opened its financial books to the public.

“This is really an unprecedented step to provide openness and transparency in local government," said Shelby Township Supervisor Rick Stathakis.

With the help of a $12,500 state grant to create the technology needed to post all the township’s financial intelligence online, Stathakis, together with the IT and finance departments, created a Financial Dashboard and a micro-site to store all the township’s budget information online.

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The site went live the beginning of October, but was just recently posted on the homepage of www.Shelbytwp.org. Stathakis said he plans on introducing the system to the township at Tuesday night’s Board of Trustees meeting.

Pieces of the township’s budget were previously available online, but this is the first time all the data was compiled in an easy to understand format and posted in a central location.

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“This is the first Shelby Township Dashboard ever. Going forward we’re going to continue to improve and refine it,” he said.

The information is broken down into two parts.

The dashboard is a PDF of data that contains information that affects citizens such as public safety figures, quality of life measurements and the township’s economic strength.

The second part is the full budget broken down by departments. The budgetary documents include an amended 2010 budget and adopted 2011 budget by fund and a budget revenue and expense documents that contain historical information for 2009 and 2008.

“Our residents can look and compare numbers and get a very detailed glimpse of their local government,” said Stathakis. "This is all the financial data that we turn into the federal government.”

Stathakis said he has always been a proponent of transparency in government.

Since taking office in 2009, some of the moves Stathakis said the township has made to improve public trust include eliminating voting on official policies by the Board of Trustees during work sessions, and turning over public FOIA requests to the Human Resource Department to avoid the possibility that a trustee will see FOIA information about themselves.

Stathakis invited the public to attend a 2012 priorities meeting at Cherry Creek on Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. to help the board determine their goals for the upcoming year.

“We’re going to continue to improve the public trust by focusing on public participation,” he said.


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