Making public data easy to find
Without transparency, citizens cannot know or understand what is happening in their government. Yet, it is not always easy to find out how tax dollars are being spent. Now, Searchlight New Mexico is making finding such information easier by gathering five years of data on employee salaries for state, county and city workers all across New Mexico. The information gathered also includes pension contributions for government and school agencies back to 2013, as well as financial disclosures from 2013 through 2017 that are required by state statute.
Phase 1 of Your Data, as the project is called, marks just the beginning of how the nonprofit news organization Searchlight is working to make public information better available to the public — for free. Your Data is a web portal designed to make it easier for all people — not just journalists, but academics, public interest groups and others — to find essential government data.
The first phase was the posting of employee salaries, with a second phase coming over the next few months that will contain government contracts, the budgets of New Mexico’s state agencies, as well as the largest county and municipal governments. The information is available online at data.searchlightnm.com. Just put in a name or an agency, and the search begins. (Should you be so inclined, you also can donate to help Searchlight continue its work. A screen will pop up to make donating easier.)
Not so easy: gathering the data. As Searchlight officials wrote, “We already are running into heavy resistance. One county insists it does not have payroll records in digital format. That begs the question: How are its employees paid? Given this resistance, it may take several months to fully build out the portal, but we won’t stop until it is completed.”
With media resources dwindling across the country, the Searchlight New Mexico mission is to bring high-impact, investigative journalism to bear on issues that matter. Today, many news organizations lack the resources to sue over access to public records; with the work of Searchlight, those records will be gathered and made available through a permanent digital record. This is important. No matter who is governor or mayor, these archives will be available to the people who want or need the information.
The project began under Searchlight co-founder and board Chairman Ray Rivera, former editor of The New Mexican, who is now at The Seattle Times. The work — investigative journalism and making public data available — is continuing. That’s good news for the citizens of this state whose tax dollars pay the bills.