Screenshot taken from Connecticut’s new Open Data website
Those looking for a model on how to disclose economic development deals should start their search in Connecticut. No joke: Connecticut is cutting edge when it comes to taxpayer transparency on economic development.
Yesterday, Governor Dannel Malloy launched a new website called Data.CT.gov which aggregates numerous datasets that were previously unavailable or difficult to find. Included in this portal are many economic development programs we have doggedly watched and evaluated for transparency and accountability. Our January 2014 study ranked Connecticut 14th on job subsidy transparency: the states’ new website is a clear improvement that would have boosted their ranking into the top ten nationally had it been in use when we ranked all 50 states.
The Governor’s new transparency efforts came to fruition through two executive orders: one creating the website and the other instructing the state’s economic development agency to compile a searchable electronic database of subsidy information.
What makes the Connecticut website such a great model?
- Clean Data: Often state agencies put up data in a haphazard fashion. Misspellings, data irregularities, and so forth make the data less useable. Worse, sometimes agencies put up data in static, unsearchable PDFs, not databases which contain the same information. When Good Jobs First imports data into our 50-state Subsidy Tracker database, this sort of messy data requires a great deal of clean-up. It’s clear that Connecticut has taken the time to ensure the data isn’t messy.
- Relevant Data: The Connecticut portal also includes extremely important data that other states frequently forget to include. These fields include things such as clawback amounts, contract date timelines, job benchmarks, the result of a jobs audit, the amount of a subsidy awarded, the amount of a subsidy disbursed in each year, and the facility address. Including these data fields meets many of Good Jobs First’s best practices recommendations. In fact, the only data that really seems to have been omitted from the database is information about the wages and benefits of subsidized jobs (see here).
- Data Tools: Another open data best practice is to allow users to easily search through the data. The database includes built-in mapping tools, filters, and charts. As the screenshot above illustrates, taxpayers can now easily see on a map all film tax credit recipients that were issued tax credit amounts greater than $1 million.
- Downloadable Data: Connecticut doesn’t hamstring users like it used to with a single big PDF. Now the data is available in a variety of easy to download formats including XML, CSV, and, of course, Excel spreadsheets.
- More Data: Frequently states spend a great deal of time disclosing data about a few major programs, but forget to disclose information about other economic development programs. This database includes tax credits, grants, loans, and other economic development tools. For more discussion about tax credit disclosure, see our previous blog on the topic. Connecticut’s data also includes previously undisclosed data about programs. For instance, it includes street addresses for film tax credit recipients.
- Potential taxpayer savings: In the long run, the database will also save Connecticut taxpayers money. Frequently, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests cost the government great resources in responding. But the new website will include frequently requested FOIA data. In addition to staff time saved, the enhanced ability for more citizens to know how their tax dollars are being spent will prevent waste, fraud, and abuse and enhance accountability.
We encourage you to go on the website and give it whirl: https://data.ct.gov/Business/Tax-Credit-Portfolio-Point-Map/megq-7hbv
clawback.org 
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