Sen. Charbonneau has introduced SB 106 requiring the Department of Local Government Finance to develop criteria for evaluating the fiscal health of a political subdivision. Suggested indicators are: cash balance, debt to revenue ratio, assessed value, per capita tax revenue, per capita operating revenue, tax revenue trends, and whether there is a structural deficit or surplus.
The DLGF is then instructed to spoon feed the data to the public – or, at least, the legislation requires that the information be conveniently and easily accessible from a single website, and “must be presented in a manner that is commonly known as an Internet dashboard.”
Although I’ve spent more than my fair share of time on the Internet, I was not immediately familiar with the term “Internet dashboard.” I did find this definition:
An easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance.
It’s an old term that gets thrown around by people trying to sound technical when they shouldn’t. Frankly, your Facebook timeline could be considered a dashboard.
Anymore it’s better to call them what they are: webpages.
The best way to make the data available would be a table.
Information will be pretty useless without baselines to compare against. The DLGF has a pretty poor track record of sharing this info without perspective and then having legislators and executive branch leaders make bad policy based on the info.
Yeah, a table of the data is all that is needed.
Also, why does the DLGF have to show its work when the IEDC doesn’t have to? I know why but how can we measure the fiscal health without some numbers?
Bah.