New online tool shows you how Sedgwick County spends money

Sedgwick County launched a new, interactive way to look at its budget online Monday.

The county’s “open budget” allows residents to look at how the county is spending money, complete with maps, pie charts and graphs. You can view it at http://openbudget.sedgwickcounty.org.

“We did this exercise in an effort to increase transparency of county financial information,” said Chief Financial Officer Chris Chronis. “I’m extremely happy with the work that has been done and I think it’ll be a useful tool for our citizens.”

Currently, Sedgwick County has online a PDF copy of its budget broken into separate sections. Chronis says that format has its limits.

“It’s a static display,” he said. “You have no ability to see any changes that have occurred in the budget since original adoption nor do you have any ability to see how the government is operating against that budget.”

The county has also posted its checkbook online for about seven years, Chronis said. That tool shows the county’s expenditures and transactions with its vendors in a line-item format. It’s updated at the end of every month.

The new open budget is a web-based application created by a company called Socrata, which works in public finance data. The information is automatically updated every week.

“This takes into account any revisions in the adopted budget that had been made,” Chronis said.

The open budget has a search field by service, department or program. It also features a map of capital projects throughout the county and how much they cost.

Information can be broken out into pie charts and line graphs. You can download some data into Microsoft Excel files.

Chronis said the staff has worked on the open budget for the past four or five months. They got input from residents such as Lonny Wright and John Todd, who regularly follow local government.

“We wanted to see if this site worked as we wanted it to for the lay person,” Chronis said. “It is a lot of information…but it seems more complicated than it actually is.”

The initial subscription cost to Socrata was about $27,000. Chronis said the service should cost the county about $35,000 a year.

Commissioners said they were pleased with the new open budget.

“It seems to be the stuff I’ve always been looking for in an easier format,” Commissioner Richard Ranzau said.

“It’s a pretty impressive tool,” Chairman Jim Howell added.

This story was originally published November 28, 2016 at 2:15 PM with the headline "New online tool shows you how Sedgwick County spends money."