Recently, Bucks County Board of Commissioner Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia announced new transparency measures with County budgets, contracts and campaign finance reports with the following statement:
“Since taking office in January 2020, this administration has sought ways to pull back the curtain on county government to make it more accessible for residents, taxpayers and voters.
From revamping and restructuring our Communications Department to be more proactive and public-facing; to livestreaming our Commissioners’ meetings using state-of-the-art equipment; to utilizing and expanding social media platforms to an ever-growing audience; to completely rebuilding our website to be more responsive, intuitive and accessible, we have strived to make government more transparent at every level.
Today, I am proud to further the mission to be more transparent in a major way. Normally, contracts, detailed budget documents and campaign finance are only accessible by request or appointment. In 2024, this information should be simple to retrieve, so that process is prohibitive and antiquated. Therefore, I have directed our senior staff to remove the red tape, so the public has easy access to the information they are entitled to as soon as possible.
To begin, we will make all County contracts moving forward accessible and searchable on buckscounty.gov. We will investigate potential grant opportunities to allow for the addition/scanning of historical contracts, making those available as well.
Further, we will make the entire county budget more detailed on buckscounty.gov so members of the public and press can find exactly the information they are looking for without having to jump through any hoops.
Finally, I have directed staff to make Campaign Finance Records available on the Board of Elections website. Once activated, candidates and committees will be able to file reports online and the public will be able to view and search those reports. Like contracts, we will determine the feasibility of including historical records.
While these directives may take some time to achieve, I am confident that our dedicated staff will work as quickly as possible to make these transparency measures a reality.”
Once the County has cleared any technical and legal hurdles, these three initiatives will be rolled out immediately.
