In the coming months, you will be able to get more detailed information about where tax dollars are spent in Greenwood, and in the future, where police officers are being called.
Greenwood is spending about $5,000 on an online financial portal that will allow residents to comb through city budgets. The city also recently met with officials from Fishers and Marion County to discuss a similar approach to police records, Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers said.
“People want to know what’s going on in their neighborhood and their city,” Myers said. “Crimes, the city’s budget — the more we can put online and the more we can be accessible to the community the better off we are.”
Greenwood was one of 16 cities that tested the new OpenGov portal and will be the first to commit to using the new budgeting tool.
City officials began looking into a better way to put budget information online after studying traffic on its website, city controller Adam Stone said. More than 200 people spent several minutes looking through the city’s budget, Stone said.
The new portal will allow people to search for the information they want, Stone said. Currently, the budget on the city’s website is mostly PDF files and hard to navigate, Stone said.
If residents, city officials or employees want to find a particular expense or department budget on the portal, they can use a search function that takes them right to the information they want, Stone said. The portal also will be easier to use on cellphones and tablets, Stone said.
