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Trustees in Austintown, Canfield support online checkbook initiative
YOUNGSTOWN
Township trustees in Austintown and Canfield said they are interested in putting their communities’ checkbooks online.
“Frankly, the transparency issue in this day and age is important,” said Austintown Trustee Kenneth Carano. “I will pursue this for Austintown. We so desperately want to give people the information they want, and having it online won’t tax our workers.”
“It’s a great opportunity to provide information and to help with budgeting,” said Canfield Trustee Marie Izzo-Cartwright. “To be able to see what we’ve done in the past and what we will do in the future will be a good fit for the township.”
The comments came after officials with the Ohio Treasurer’s office and OpenGov, a California-based company working with the treasurer, gave a presentation Friday at the Covelli Centre to about a dozen people on adapting the state’s OhioCheckbook.com to local governments.
The website, launched Dec. 2, allows people to do online searches of more than $400 billion in state spending since 2008, said Eric Ochmanek, project-management officer at the treasurer’s office.
There have been about 220,000 searches on the state’s checkbook website, which puts all state spending information online.
Mayor John A. McNally, who was at the meeting with three city council members, said he expects the city’s financial information to be online by the end of this year.
“Some of our staff is concerned with this information being out there that they’ll be inundated with questions on the data,” he said. “It might happen at first, but people will probably learn how to use it, and the amount of those questions will decline.”
Youngstown and Mahoning County last month committed to joining the initiative.
Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has offered to help the state’s 3,962 local government entities – mostly counties, cities, townships, villages, school districts, libraries – set up their online financial data at no cost.
“We custom-build each government to what they want,” said Brian Chaney, an OpenGov account executive. “We can go back five years or 15 years. It’s designed to meet everyone’s needs. It’s a minimal investment of time for cities or counties. They provide the information, and we do the heavy lifting.”