NPRI NEWS RELEASE
LAS VEGAS — TransparentNevada.com, the searchable Nevada Policy Research Institute website that makes government data easily available to taxpayers, has been updated to offer visitors even more.
Now the site includes 122 bargaining agreements from across the state between local governments (including school districts) and public-employee unions. Contracts from northern counties total 64, while contracts from Clark County alone total 58.
Because government-union contracts in Nevada are still negotiated in secret, this will be the first opportunity for many Nevadans to learn the details of the often-lavish agreements.
The site also now provides the school-performance data of the Clark County School District in a single, searchable spreadsheet, optimized for the use of parents, researchers and teachers. The downloadable file combines the data from some 314 separate PDF documents published by CCSD.
Now on the site through October, in searchable summary form, are the State of Nevada spending contracts approved by Gov. Brian Sandoval, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and Secretary of State Ross Miller — the three of them sitting as the state Board of Examiners.
The searchable office spending of Nevada’s U.S. Representatives — Joe Heck, Shelley Berkley and Mark Amodei — has been updated through June. Congress releases the office-disbursement information 60 days after the end of a calendar quarter.
Salary data for the 2011 calendar year has been added from six new jurisdictions: the Carson City, Elko County, Lyon Country and Mineral County school districts, and the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County and the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority.
“TransparentNevada provides an important public service by allowing citizens, lawmakers and media members easy access to public documents,” said Andy Matthews, NPRI president. “These updates represent our efforts to provide the public with complete information — even for lesser known jurisdictions.”
Matthews noted that none of the school districts in this update provided a breakdown between the cost of salary, overtime and other pay as required by law, so the information provided is not as complete as it should be.
“Even though these are smaller jurisdictions, some of these government employees make exorbitant salaries,” he said. “For instance, the executive director of the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County took home over $269,000 in 2011.”
Matthews added that TransparentNevada.com has also added a new search function, which allows searching by employee name on a specific jurisdiction’s page of salaries.
