Budget Info Still Elusive on Town Website [Update]

Update, Thursday:

First Selectman Jayme Stevenson says she wants to make it easier for town residents to find budget and other information on the Darien town website.

But her own office, which posts information to the website on Board of Selectmen meetings, hasn't been posting notices of upcoming board meetings about the town budget to the Home page, where important town meetings are regularly posted.

Town Administration Officer Karl Kilduff, who works out of her office suite, has issued a budget proposal that is still difficult to navigate to from the Home page—and isn't posted on the main Web pages for the Board of Selectmen or first selectmen.

The Home page does have handy, direct links to "Dog Licensing Facts" and "Review the results of the recent Emergency Medication Dispensing Exercise (drill) at Middlesex Middle School."

Just not to the proposed town budget, or the Board of Selectmen's role in it.

Asked about the fact that the Board of Selectmen's budget meetings are not listed with other board and commission meetings on the Home page of the website (even though regular Board of Selectmen meetings are there), or why budget documents are not easier to find on the website, Stevenson said she wants to change all that.

"There's some general agreement that it's not the easiest website to navigate," she said Tuesday. "I [...] have a desire that the public knows about meetings."

Not all board meetings are posted on the website, or on the list of meetings on the Home page, Stevenson said. "I've been trying to change that."

Stevenson has created a committee to look into and improve town government communications, including the town website, she said.

When asked if there was any technical difficulty in posting all meetings to the website, Stevenson said the technology wasn't the problem.she replied, "There's no reason why it is the way it is, other than it's past practice that needs to be improved upon."

Asked why not all town government meetings have been posted on the part of the Home page that does list many of them, she said, "It's a decentralized posting process." Individual town departments connected with certain boards and commissions have been posting meetings to the Home page or not, as they've seen fit, she said.

Asked which meetings were not posted on the Home page aside from Board of Selectmen budget meetings and Board of Education meetings, Stevenson said she didn't know which particular ones. Later she indicated the Darien Housing Authority didn't have its meetings listed on the Home page. (A search on the town government website on Wednesday turned up a Youth Commission meeting on that night that wasn't listed on the Home page (see cached version) although a notice about that upcoming meeting could be found elsewhere on the website.)

"You have to dig through the website," to find Web postings about upcoming meetings, Stevenson said. "Typically [...] meetings are posted on their [board's or related department's] page of the website."

Asked specifically why the Board of Selectmen's own budget meetings were not posted to the normal spot for meeting information on the website—the "Upcoming Darien Events" section of the Home page—she said: "There's clearly no unwillingness to do it. It's just a matter of whoever posted it in the past."

She was asked if she would get date, time and place information about the Board of Selectmen budget meetings put in that section of the Home page in the future.

"I'll ask about it," the first selectman said. She added, "We can certainly get it on the Board of Selectmen's Web page where it belongs."

A little later during the interview, Stevenson turned to an assistant in her office to ask if the meetings could be posted on the Home page. The assistant said she could do that.

But a day later, a notice of Wednesday night's budget meeting of the board was not posted on the Home page, nor were any budget meetings posted on the Board of Selectmen's Web page—or on the page listing past and future Board of Selectmen meetings.

If you don't already have a link to the list of budget meetings you can find it through this long, convoluted process: (1) go from the Home page to the "Darien Government" page, then, (2) in the column on the lefthand side of that page, move your cursor past the "Elected Officials" item (which automatically brings up a popup link to that "Board of Selectmen" page) and move on to "Meeting Schedules, Agendas & Minutes" item, then (3) follow that to "Boards and Commissions" popup, then (4) follow that to the "Board of Selectmen" popup and (5) put your cursor on that spot, at that point a further popup titled "Budget Meetings" will appear. Click on that (6) and you're at the list of budget meetings—still the only spot where the time, date and place of those meetings (about half of which have already taken place) appear on the town website.

Or you can go to Darien Patch. Town board and commission meetings are listed in the "Morning Briefing" column on Darien Patch, including, from now on, all known Board of Selectmen budget meetings.

The board's next meeting is at 7:45 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 6, in Room 206.

Finance Director Kathleen Clark Buch said there is a link from the Finance Department's Web page to the proposed budget. "Proposed Budget for FY 2012-2013 " can be found there at the top of the second column in the "Important Links" section of that page.

Editor's note: Wording changes were mae and typographical errors removed in the above section of this article at 9:52 a.m., Friday.

Original article, Tuesday:

Anyone interested in where Darien officials are considering spending the town's money in the next fiscal year may want to see what information about the budget proposal that town officials have posted on the town's website.

But it won't be easy to find.

On the Home page, the future budget isn't mentioned, although the Home page does mention the "New CodeRED Mobile Alert Public Safety App," the all-night parking restriction and "Dog Licensing Facts," with links to appropriate pages on the town website. There are just no links to town budget information.

On the Board of Selectmen page, the future budget isn't mentioned.

On the main Web page for the First Selectman's Office, the future budget isn't mentioned.

Since the town administrator, Karl Kilduff, presents a proposed budget to selectmen, one might search the web page for that town official. But no links are found there, either.

Instead, give up on finding a link to a web page with budget information. Less time will be wasted by doing a search for "budget" in the search box in the upper right-hand corner of the Home page. Here's the result.

Now scroll down to "Proposed budgets." This may appear to be little different from the item above it, named "Current Approved budget Details", but that item refers to documents from 2008. The clue that "Proposed budgets" refers to the current proposed budget is in the third line of that item, way at the end, where the date "1/26/2012" appears.

Click on it.

Congratulations: You've found the "Budget for FY 2012-2013" page. On it you'll find these links (each document is also posted with this Darien Patch article):

General Fund Budget FY 2012-2013

Other Funds Budget FY 2012-2013

Revenue Budget FY 2012-2013

In a paragraph above those links, a short description of the budget process is given:

"The Administrative Officer has presented a proposed budget to the Board of Selectmen.  The Board of Selectmen will be meeting to discuss the proposed budget and make revisions to it. A schedule of those meetings can be found here. The proposed budget can be found by clicking on the appropriate link below. Please note that this does not include the Board of Education's proposed budget. That can be found here on the Board of Education website.

The links in that paragraph are two other useful sets of information for someone who wants to follow the town budget process: schedules of meetings for both the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Education.

Informaton from those lists of meetings can't be found on the town website's Home page, although other board meetings—both regular meetings and special meetings—can be found under the heading "Upcoming Events in Darien."

The first two paragraphs on the Home page state the goal of the website and issue a warning about it.

The goal: "The purpose of the Town of Darien Web site is to provide timely information about our community, its services, and some of its activities."

The warning: "While a sincere effort is made to insure an accurate representation of all information herein, there is no guarantee of such accuracy and you are advised not to rely thereon."