Sunshine Review, an excellent source for government transparency, spent months of hard work reviewing and ranking the web sites for county governments across the U.S.
Sunshine Review’s County websites, state-by-state rankings was just published with Kansas ranking #36. The best state for county government transparency was #1 Arizona, and the worst was #50 Vermont.
The line for Kansas counties shown below from the summary table highlights strengths and weaknesses in government openness for Kansas county web sties. Kansas counties scored best with information about elected and administrative officials, and the worst with contracts, lobbying, taxes, meetings and audits information:
|
Rank |
State |
||||||
| 36 | Kansas counties |
20% |
4% |
66% |
53% |
24% |
5% |
|
Rank |
State |
Overall transparency |
||||
| 36 | Kansas counties |
0% |
0% |
15% |
3% |
19% |
The links to county web sites in the comparison chart are quite useful. For example, here are links to the largest ten Kansas county information pages. [Population estimates are for July 1, 2008.]
Links to Kansas county information
| County | Population Estimate |
| Johnson | 534,093 |
| Sedgwick | 482,863 |
| Shawnee | 174,709 |
| Wyandotte | 154,287 |
| Douglas | 114,748 |
| Leavenworth | 74,276 |
| Riley | 71,069 |
| Butler | 63,562 |
| Reno | 63,427 |
| Saline | 54,657 |
Sunshine Review’s evaluation of Kansas county websites shows they could not find web sites for 20 counties, including Barber, Chase, Chautauqua, Cherokee, Comanche, Decatur, Edwards, Gove, Gray, Greenwood, Hamilton, Jewell, Lane, Logan, Norton, Rawlins, Rooks, Smith, Wallace, Wichita.
This information should be invaluable in various research projects.
Tags: government transparency, Kansas Counties, Sunshine Review
