Township Touts Its Financial Transparency on the Web

Lower Saucon Township was already going the extra mile in terms of what financial information it posts on its website, but a recently-published Patch column by Lehigh Valley Independent blogger Jon Geeting motivated officials to make the site even more useful to local residents, Township Manager Jack Cahalan announced at township council's Feb. 2 meeting.

In an effort to be more financially transparent, the township will now post monthly financial reports online on its website, www.lowersaucontownship.org, Cahalan announced.

The January 2011 column by Geeting, called "," singled out several Northampton County municipalities for their efforts to make budgets and other financial data available to their residents online. Included in Geeting's shout-out for having well-designed and "aesthetically appealing websites that look like they were created within the last decade" were Bethlehem Township, Forks Township, Northampton and Easton.

The lack of a shout-out for Lower Saucon Township--which recently redesigned its website and made it accessible to users of newer Internet broswers such as Google Chrome--was disappointing to the township, Cahalan indicated.

Lower Saucon Township has been a local leader in municipal online transparency by posting both its entire budget for the past four years and audits for the past two years online, he said, adding that among Lehigh Valley municipalities only Lower Saucon Township and Salisbury Township (Lehigh County) meet this standard.

Assistant Township Manager Leslie Huhn distributed a chart which listed municipalities with copies of budgets and/or audits posted online as confirmation of what Cahalan said.

At present, the borough of Hellertown posts neither its budgets nor audits online.

In Geeting's column, he did not mention Hellertown but noted that many small Northampton County municipalities such as Bangor, Chapman, Glendon, Portland and Walnutport "don't have websites at all."

"Nineteen other municipalities don't make any budget information available online," Geeting wrote.

"There is some good solid information on our website," Cahalan said at the meeting. "We've been spending money on that."