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500 E. Capitol Ave.
Pierre, S.D. 57501
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, July 5,2011
CONTACT: Jason Dilges at 773-3411 or Tony Venhuizen at 605-773-3212
Governor Says More State Government Information To Be Available Online
PIERRE, S.D. – Gov. Dennis Daugaard said today that efforts are under way to increase public access to state government information that is meaningful to South Dakotans.
“Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will,’ and I believe that South Dakotans should be provided with all the useful information possible about their state government,” Gov. Daugaard said. “We should exclude only proprietary business information, those things that would jeopardize our safety or security, other information the Legislature has deemed should be confidential, and the personal information people provide in the course of their dealings with state government.”
Two major government watchdog groups, Sunshine Review and U.S. PIRG (the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups), score states’ transparency websites. Sunshine Review currently gives South Dakota at “B-“ grade. U.S. PIRG gave South Dakota a score of 25 out of 100, for an “F” in 2010, but raised the South Dakota score to 63 for a “D+” this year.
Gov. Daugaard directed his staff to study those surveys and identify things that could be improved.
South Dakota’s main transparency website – Open.SD.gov – was launched in September of 2008, providing real-time access to financial information from the state’s accounting and payroll systems. In 2009, state agencies seeking competitive proposals when awarding or renewing most contracts for professional services exceeding $50,000 began posting those requests online; additional contract details were added in 2010.
The Governor said several enhancements will be in place within a few weeks on the OpenSD.gov website.
“Government transparency is important, and we want to continue putting information on our transparency website that is of use to South Dakotans,” Gov. Daugaard said. “We don’t want to spend time, effort and money just to get better grades from these watchdog groups, but we want to provide useful information.”
Enhancements expected to be in place by late July include:
· Checkbook-level detail on vendor payments: Adding the ability to see payments at the individual invoice level for a vendor, instead of only a total category
· Ability to search for payments by purpose or activity: Allowing searches by type of payment, like “computer consultant” or “motor vehicles,” and seeing all vendors and payments for those items
· Easier employee salary search: More than 78 percentof the activity on Open SD is related to employee salaries. Enhancements will simplify locating an individual employee’s salary
· Adding the ability to download data into an Excel spreadsheet
· Information on how to navigate the state’s Open Records Request process
After the enhancements are completed, South Dakota will likely get an “A-“from the Sunshine Review and a “C+” from the Public Interest Research Group.
The main area of scoring where South Dakota will be lacking, according to U.S. PIRG, is in providing tax expenditure information. However, that topic is scheduled to be studied by the Legislature this summer.
OpenSD currently contains 479,882 general ledger balances, records of 27,669 vendors who receive payments from state government, the salaries of 16,539 state employees, and copies of 4,323 state contracts.
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