Portage residents can keep track of how the city spends tax dollars on the city’s website.
Portage Clerk-Treasurer Christopher Stidham announced the launch of a high-tech answer to keeping financial transparency in government Wednesday at the city council meeting.
Stidham, in his second four-year term, demonstrated his department’s new online web portal, which breaks down every dollar going in and coming out of the city, said Stidham, who recently completed law school.
“My goal is to make sure people have that trust in government, and this is one way to do that,” he said. “All this is public data anyway, but there’s a difference between what we have to and what we can do to get that trust.”
Department employees for years have used Keystone, a government finance software package, to track spending, budgets and other financial metrics. With a few keystrokes, city workers now can export all of that data into the new portal, developed by a firm called Tableau.
The Tableau software package cost the city $2,000, and it will cost about $500 a year to keep it up, Stidham said.
Prior to the updated site, his department uploaded charts and information he described as hard to use, especially for those who don’t deal with such data on a daily basis, he said.
His seven-employee staff has been working on the new portal since January, Stidham said, but they rushed to finish the new portal for the council meeting.
Called the Financial Transparency Portal, the new portal includes easy-to-follow bar graphs and pie charts, many of them color-coded. By clicking on certain tabs, site visitors can see how much money each city department is spending, compare it to the available budget and track spending back to 2014.
Another tab reveals each department’s spending, depicted in blue bars, compared to their budgets, indicated by orange bars.
Users also can follow each check leaving the city to vendors of all kinds. Each check written from the city since 2014 for the city’s animal shelter, from kennel fees to food, to the Humane Society, for example.
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Financial transparency is critical, no matter what it looks like on paper or on a screen, Stidham said.
“At the end of the day, it is their money, and residents should know where it’s going,” he said.
Users can visit the city by going to www.CI.Portage.In.US, the city’s website, and clicking on the Financial Transparency Portal on the clerk-treasurer’s portion of the site.
Michael Gonzalez is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.