Coweta County website reaches transparency milestone

Coweta County’s website has received the highest grade given to government websites by the non-profit Sunshine Review. The Sunshine Review evaluates the transparency and information provided by more than 6,000 state and local government websites and assigned a grade to each.

Coweta County Public Affairs Director Patricia Palmer said the website rating was recently raised to an A+ after an intensive effort to insure that more information was easily available on the site. 

“Sunshine Review applauds Coweta County, Georgia for improving their transparency score from a ‘B-‘ to an ‘A+’ in only a month. By enhancing their website and increasing access to information, Coweta County is proactively championing government openness and transparency,” said Sunshine Review President Michael Barnhart. “Taxpayers in Coweta County should be proud that their government learned from Sunshine Review’s transparency checklist and made rapid improvements to allow more light into their government. We urge all of Georgia’s city and county governments to put the necessary resources into increasing their transparency like Coweta County has done.”

Palmer in referencing the high transparency score said it came after a number of improvements were made to enhance citizen access.

“We are very happy to have received the A+ rating. We are committed to providing county information in the most transparent manner possible and improving this grade gives important outside recognition of that. The increase in our grade came after adding some documents, like a listing of county contracts, and improving the access to some other information, like adding a list of contact names and numbers, which were all there before, but were not on the same page,” Palmer said. 

Palmer said the county will continue its efforts to make the website even easier to access.