Transparency is a decision, not a budget

When someone asks a town to publish information, the answer often comes back as a workload problem. Staff are stretched, the systems are old, there is no money for a new project. Sometimes that is true. I wanted to know whether it is true for the basics.

So I ran a small experiment. I had already gathered Cochrane’s residential tax rate for every year since 2020, each one read from the by-law that set it. I put them on one page with a calculator, then rebuilt that page in the Town website’s own colours, to show where it should actually live. The mockup, table, calculator and all, took less than ten minutes to build.

It was fast because nothing had to be created. The rates were in by-laws Council already passed. The links point at documents already sitting on the Town’s own document portal. The median assessment figure comes from the Town’s own budget package. Everything existed except the page.

Keeping it current would take one new row, once a year, when the tax rate by-law passes. That is the entire maintenance plan.

I am not suggesting every kind of openness is free. Some records take real work to assemble, and staff time is a real constraint. But the next time publishing something basic is described as a burden, the useful question is what it would actually take. For the tax rates, the answer turned out to be minutes. What was missing was not capacity. It was a decision.

See for yourself: the tax rate history, the mockup of what the Town could publish, and the bill calculator. If you spot something wrong on any of them, write to me at dan4cochrane@gmail.com.