The Peoria Area League of Women Voters has a new e-Transparency survey. Peoria Public Radio’s Tanya Koonce reports:
The survey covers about 40 local government's websites. Rick Fox is the eTransparancy project chair for the league. He says the 20 question survey looked at website details for each governing body including meeting schedules and agendas, financial information and Freedom of Information ACT particulars.
“It’s about trying to point out where some gaps are and where we think people could improve, and for those that are doing the right things, to point that out,” Fox says.
Some agencies like the Peoria Election Commission received bad grades. Tom Bride is the Executive Director of the recently merged city and county office. The office website received an F.
Bride says, “we’re going to use this very much as an encouragement and tool to look at, fresh eyes what we should put up on website. But most of this stuff isn’t statute driven. It just says if you have a website then you have to have these certain things.”
State law is fairly silent on the matter of standard public information on local government websites and there is no mechanism for enforcing such concerns.
Peoria County has some election commission material on its website but it’s not accessible through the election commission site. The county also plans to include the election commission in the rebuild of its website.
Link to the Greater Peoria Area League of Women Voter’s eTransparency Survey.