Gimenez unveils transparency website

Long gone are the days when the only way for the public to see Miami-Dade County's budget or an upcoming agenda was to get a hard copy from County Hall -- those documents have been online for years.

But there are still plenty of public documents that aren't readily accessible online.

During his 2011 campaign for county mayor, Carlos Gimenez promised to make "most records available online" -- one of 18 promises PolitiFact Florida is tracking on our Carlos-O-Meter.

"Florida's Government-in-the-Sunshine Law authorizes public access to all municipal records," Gimenez said on his campaign website. "It's a great law, but not always user friendly. Records are sometimes buried in files or boxes, or otherwise inaccessible thanks to less-than-cooperative record keepers. One of my goals is to move Miami-Dade County government toward a paperless system of record keeping, aided by computer technology, which would make most records available online."

About one month after he won election, Gimenez unveiled a transparency website to the public on Aug. 1, 2011. The website has county budgets, financial reports and bondholder reports -- information that was already available on the county's website. But it also has a new component: an online checkbook showing disbursements. We tested out the checkbook, which shows amounts disbursed to various individuals and companies but doesn't provide an explanation of the expenditures. We can guess what some expenditures were for -- such as payments to Florida Power and Light or Bellsouth Communications -- but we have no idea from simply looking at the online checkbook what the expenditures for "HMF FL A LLC" or the "Cigarette Racing Team" were for. (The website does contain some warnings including that the data is unaudited and that the search is not a substitute for a public records request and provides a link to contact the county.)

The county plans to add more details to the checkbook -- including brief descriptions of expenditures -- but doesn't have a target date set, county spokeswoman Suzy Trutie said in an e-mail interview. Gimenez also plans to add salary information for all employees -- but no launch date has been set.

Gimenez doesn't get all the credit for the online checkbook. In 2010, Commissioner Bruno Barreiro was the prime sponsor of a resolution directing the county to post the register. Gimenez, county commission chairman at the time, was one of multiple co-sponsors and spoke in favor of it.

Commission background information about the resolution states that Gimenez "noted employee salaries were public records with no privacy rights attached and were accessible to the public. He agreed that Commissioner Barreiro's proposal was a huge step towards better transparency. He also noted that posting the invoice, requisition or paycheck stub should suffice as an explanation for the expenditure."

We asked Trutie how Gimenez decided what to put on the website. She said in addition to the 2010 county resolution, county officials looked at a state bill that created the Transparency Florida website for appropriations as well as other government websites. 

"At this time, we are only posting what is required by the resolution," Trutie said in an e-mail. "However, this project is a work in progress and subject to changes."

There are lots of other types of public records that Gimenez could add to increase government transparency. For example, in neighboring Broward County the county commission has a website that includes a disclosure database containing commissioners' financial disclosures -- which they are required by state law to submit annually -- and forms listing outside employment among other documents. Broward also has an online visitors' log that shows who visited individual county commissioners. Trutie said Dade has no plans to add financial disclosures or a visitors' log.

Gimenez also made a related promise to post his calendar on the Internet -- Trutie said there is no launch date for that but the county is in the process of developing it. Gimenez promised to post "most records available online" -- ultimately that could be difficult to measure because "most" isn't an exact term and before he took office the county already posted several documents. But Gimenez's transparency website, launched one month after he won election, is a start toward his promise of putting most county records online. We rate this promise In the Works.