After Mayor David Coss announced the city website's recent win of a transparency award from Sunshine Review at this week's City Council meeting, not everybody was impressed.
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Councilor Patti Bushee, fresh off her reelection victory from earlier this month, says she found the award a little puzzling.
"I'm not dismissing the efforts of our staff," she tells SFR, "but I've never found our website to be that navigable."
Bushee says documents like city employee salaries and detailed budgetary information should be more easily available online. She says she wants Santa Fe's city website to be similar to Albuquerque's or the state's Sunshine Portal.
Diana Lopez, a senior editor at the Alexandria, Va.-based Sunlight Review, says her organization is sympathetic to Bushee's concerns. Lopez says the award for Santa Fe was based on a minimum 10-point checklist that includes public meeting information, city zoning information and public records policies. She says local governments shouldn't take the awards to mean that there's not room for improvement.
"None of these are really anything too deep and we understand that," Lopez tells SFR. "It's sort of a first step that any government needs to take to be transparent."
Sunshine Review has been awarding city and county websites since 2010. Since then, 365 of 6,000 government websites judged have won transparency awards, Lopez says.
Other New Mexico-related Sunshine Review awards went to the websites of Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, Las Cruces, Rio Rancho, Santa Fe County, Santa Fe Public Schools, Albuquerque Public Schools and Las Cruces Public Schools.
Lopez says Sunlight Review will be updating the standards for such awards in 2013.
