By Wesley P. Hester
Media General News Service

A ranking of Virginia’s most transparent local governments finds most of the Richmond area doing comparatively well at providing information on the Web.

In a recent report, the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy—a nonpartisan research and education organization in Springfield—scored localities on budget and expenditure information available online.

On the list of 134 localities, Goochland County was ranked fourth with a score of 65.5 out of 100. Goochland edged out Henrico County, in fifth place, with a score of 61.5.

The recognition is noteworthy for Goochland, which was beset by problems last year related to financial mismanagement, leading to questions of transparency. After a government shakeup led to the county administrator’s resignation, Rebecca T. Dickson took the helm in July.

Since then, the county has increased the amount of financial information provided online, going so far as to post a check register detailing county spending.

“We knew we had a problem with transparency, and now we’re addressing it,” said Goochland Supervisor Ned S. Creasey, who attributed much of the progress to Dickson. “It’s a whole lot easier to deal with your problems if you get them out there where people know you’re not trying to hide them.”

Only the counties of Arlington, Fairfax and Prince William did better than Goochland, taking the gold, silver and bronze respectively. Arlington’s score was an 80, leaving plenty of room for all the state’s localities to improve.

Especially the 23 localities with scores of zero, meaning no information was available.

“I think some of the counties with smaller staffs and lower budgets probably haven’t realized how easy it is to put some of this stuff up,” said Mike Thompson, president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute. “I don’t think in any of these cases it’s an effort to hide things as much as it is a self-deluded idea that it takes a whole lot of time to get this done.”

Added Thompson: “Frankly, they could go get themselves a high school junior and he could probably do it pretty quickly.”

Most other area localities fared reasonably well, with Richmond at 16, Hanover County at 27 and Powhatan County at 38. But not all made the top 50.

With a score of 15, Chesterfield was 105th on the list. Colonial Heights scored a zero.

Don Kappel, Chesterfield’s director of public affairs, said the report’s name—“Government Transparency in Virginia”—is slightly misleading.

He pointed out that the county makes a variety of information available in various ways, streaming its government meetings online and broadcasting them, and holding regular community meetings on the budget process.

“These are all transparency initiatives,” he said.

Chesterfield County Administrator James J.L. Stegmaier said the institute’s work on the transparency report is appreciated.

“It will be helpful to us in working to make our Web site more navigable so that this kind of information can be found more easily,” he said. “We also recently completely redesigned our Web site, which we believe works toward that end.”

The list looked not only at the amount of information available but also the ease with which it was accessed and how often it was updated.

“In some cases, it was just really hard to find the stuff. You had to click 17 different places,” said Thompson. “To us, transparency is not just if it’s there, but if you can get to it.”