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Sunshine Review: My Government Website
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| My Government Website |
| Transparency Checklist Progress reports County website project County comparison chart City website project List of cities School district website project List of school districts |
The Sunshine Review My Government Website project evaluated the information governments post on their websites at the statewide, county, city and school district level. The program evaluated websites based on Sunshine Review's transparency checklist, which checks for basic information such as meeting minutes, budgets, audits, and how to contact elected officials.
County evaluations completed
In 2009 the project completed evaluations for all 3,140 counties in the U.S.. Below are the 10 states with most transparent county governments; Arizona ranked highest at 65 percent. The scores revealed that all communities needed more transparency.
| Rank | State | Budget | Meetings | Elected officials | Admin. Officials | Permits Zoning |
Audits | Contracts | Lobbying | Public records | Taxes | Overall transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arizona counties | 87% | 100% | 93% | 86% | 80% | 54% | 14% | 0% | 47% | 94% | 65.5% |
| 2 | California counties | 86% | 100% | 86% | 36% | 83% | 76% | 57% | 3.5% | 40% | 76% | 64.35 |
| 3 | Florida counties | 71% | 91% | 85% | 69% | 76% | 49% | 34% | 1.4% | 4.4% | 82% | 56.28% |
| 4 | Washington counties | 64% | 79% | 69% | 90% | 79% | 41% | 0% | 0% | 59% | 69% | 55% |
| 5 | Maryland counties | 88% | 88% | 83% | 92% | 79% | 29% | 12.5% | 0% | 25% | 29% | 52.55% |
| 6 | New York counties | 82% | 87% | 93% | 98% | 18% | 32% | 5% | 0% | 44% | 50% | 50.9% |
| 7 | Virginia counties | 46% | 51% | 81% | 81% | 77% | 53% | 10% | 14% | 9% | 70% | 49.2% |
| 8 | New Jersey counties | 81% | 86% | 76% | 95% | 0% | 14% | 0% | 0% | 76% | 48% | 47.6% |
| 9 | North Carolina counties | 62% | 84% | 79% | 78% | 51% | 55% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 44% | 45.4% |
| 10 | Wisconsin counties | 59% | 76% | 90% | 88% | 68% | 26% | 4% | 0% | 7% | 10% | 42.8% |
MGW Progress reports
Below is a chart of progress on the My Government Website project.
| Started | Ranked | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| County website project | 0 | 3,140 | 3,140 |
| City website project | 810 | 821 | Indefinite |
| School district website project | 4,233 | 642 | 13,000 |
Perfect scores!
Also check out local government website's that received a perfect score!
- Carbondale, Illinois
- Harris County, Texas
- Clay County, Missouri
- Anderson County, South Carolina
- Cobb County, Georgia
- Washington state website
- Los Angeles County, California
- Tulsa County, Oklahoma
Project vision
The goal of the My Government Website project was to produce evaluations of the websites of every city, county, school district and state agency in all fifty states. There were four subprojects:
- The county website project. There were 3,140 counties to assess. These were completed in March of 2009.
- The city website project. There were lots of cities whose websites should be assessed.
- The school district website project. About 13,000 school district websites needed evaluating.
