City of Decatur launches fiscal transparency portal

The City of Decatur announces its partnership with ClearGov, a municipal transparency and benchmarking platform, to launch a fiscal transparency portal.  The new tool will enable taxpayers to clearly see how Decatur is funded and how this funding is allocated to provide services to its residents.

“Having an engaged community has always been important to Decatur as we believe an informed community is an engaged partner with government,” said Peggy Merriss, City Manager of Decatur.  “Providing open access to financial information is critical to building and keeping the public trust, encourages accountability, and improves the understanding of how tax money is spent within the City,” she continued.

ClearGov sources publicly available financial data on municipalities to create easy-to-understand transparency websites for thousands of municipalities across the United States, which are made available to the public for free.

City officials say Decatur is the first municipality in Georgia to offer more timely and detailed information to its residents using ClearGov.  The platform is not only designed to provide the public access to financials, but also provide a centralized source of financial data to city officials to make more informed policy and budgetary decisions.

“We are excited to partner with the City of Decatur to support their efforts towards increasing transparency and, most importantly, fostering a deeper understanding of how their government works” said Chris Bullock, CEO of ClearGov.  “We hope that other communities in Georgia recognize this new bar that Decatur has set and join Decatur in ClearGov’s community of forward-thinking municipalities.”

To visit Decatur’s ClearGov page visit:

decaturga.com/city-government/city-departments/administrative-services/decatur-by-the-numbers