Newton’s city government needs to work on transparency, building the public’s trust and a better city website, according to the League of Women Voters of Newton.
The League recently published its Municipal Transparency and Accountability Report—the culmination of two years of work surveying city residents and nearly 100 of Newton’s community-focused organizations—and found Newton lacking when it comes to technology.
“We want to emphasize that LWVN undertook this initiative to help rectify what we believe have been long-standing municipal information deficiencies here in Newton,” LWVN co-president Frieda Dweck said in a statement with the report release. “The report is not a critique of a particular administration or any specific elected officials, and we present it in the spirit that has guided all the League’s work during its 104-year history—to help make democracy, at every level, work better.”
Some highlights from the report:
People value transparency in local government.
In the League’s survey, on a scale of 1 to 10, people gave transparency a score of 9.8 when it comes to level of importance.
“Respondents provided many reasons why transparency is important, including: awareness, understanding, access, civic involvement, safety, quality, democracy, good governance, safeguarding against favoritism and bad decisions, right to know, enables advocacy, fiscal responsibility, builds trust of city within and outside, necessary for communication and input, and enables community groups to plan and be effective,” the report reads.
But they don’t feel Newton is transparent enough.
In that survey, Newton’s transparency got a score of only 5.6 out of 10.
And in the explanation section, many discussed their dissatisfaction with the city’s website.
“[T]he city still is lacking in a website that is user friendly to obtain fiscal, operational data as well as information on individual council members voting history, docket items, etc., in a comprehensive easy to access fashion for the general public to access,” one comment from an unnamed respondent cited in the report reads.
The website is really unpopular.
Others said that the website’s search functions were “useless” for anyone who isn’t an expert in city government and that having to find data on PDFs without a tutorial is “a terrible way to store an informational website.”
And it’s seen as a pretty big deal.
The majority of respondents said they have discussed their issues with the city’s website with neighbors and other community members.
“I pretty much talk about this nonstop,” one person said.
Fewer than a third of respondents said they were able to find what they needed on the city website. The rest said they ended up reaching out directly to city departments to have them send what was needed.
And respondents said they couldn’t adequately access documents pertaining to a variety of topics:
- Affordable housing grants
- ARPA funds proposals, usage
- Budget process, trends, shifts
- City Council and Committee minutes (meeting summary has no attribution of comments)
- City Council voting and attendance record
- Community Development Block Grants
- Departmental Information: employees, contacts
- Emergency rent assistance demographic data
- GIS Data that is searchable and sortable
- Inclusionary zoning fund
- Meeting materials (often not available in advance)
- Minutes and recordings of boards, commissions, City Council
- Organization charts, roles, responsibilities of departments
- Permits, search and sort function
- 311 data
People have ideas.
The survey wasn’t all complaints. It was also packed with suggestions for improving Newton’s city government transparency.
Many were related to presentation. People suggested information be delivered with visual aids like graphs and charts and that it be stored on web pages, not PDFs which are more difficult to navigate.
Respondents also called for online tutorials for the website, translation for non-English speakers and a format that is more compatible with smartphones.
The extensive report—more than 30 pages in length—also urges the city to be proactive on improving transparency by “lifting the veil” on its government with better advanced notice of what’s being discussed at public meetings and more clarity about how tax dollars are spent.
“For Newton, a municipal commitment to adopting leading-edge transparency practices can form the basis of a new relationship between the city government and its residents,” the report concludes. “In this new relationship, residents can engage more knowledgeably and actively as partners in the policymaking process, dis- and misinformation can be tamped down before spreading, and trust in government can grow.”
You can read the whole report below.