County Gov’t Develops ‘Citizen Centric Report’ for Solid Waste

By BILL BELLEN
OTSEGO COUNTY

Recently, Otsego County government officials have been making strides in an attempt to increase communications and transparency with their constituents. This has taken the form of many new initiatives and programs, including the publication of the new strategic plan platform, Clear Plan, pushed for by the Otsego County Board of Representatives in October of this year.

In another corner of government, County Administrator Steve Wilson was invited to attend the annual AGA convention by Director of Intergovernmental Partnerships for AGA John Stehle, in order to share his unique insights and learn from his expansive knowledgebase regarding government transparency and accountability.

AGA, formerly referred to as the Federal Government Accountants Association, is an organization that has long championed a program for increased municipal communication through the implementation of Citizen Centric Reports. With more than 70 chapters and over 10,000 members across the country, AGA’s efforts in this regard span from coast-to-coast and beyond to U.S. territories and even other countries. CCRs are intended to simplify the complex finances of municipal, county and even state budgets into digestible information that the average person can understand. These reports place an emphasis on imagery and symbolism to make challenging budgeting concepts more straightforward.

Stehle detailed what a CCR entails, describing it as “a four-page document that we encourage people to put together to tell the story of what their government is doing.” He continued, saying CCRs are a prime opportunity to “have a conversation about who you are. What did you do last year, what did it cost, and what do you want to do next year?…It’s about having a shared set of information that you can digest and read through without a whole lot of technical jargon around it.”

The virtual conference that Wilson was invited to was the most recent session of the summertime AGA professional development training convention. While this gathering focused on a number of AGA’s primary objectives, CCRs took center stage during a special event that consisted of Wilson and Mayor Paige Brown of Gallatin, Tennessee, joining Stehle on a panel to discuss the merits of CCRs and run through the development of one. With so much interest garnered, AGA opted to move ahead with a cohort series that would see members of municipal governments from across the country come together to craft their own CCRs for departments in need of enhanced transparency.

“We have a long-standing interest in better communication of complex things like budgets and performance,” Wilson said.

“When [John] first broached this idea, I had several possibilities for elements that I thought would be most useful for Otsego County to communicate to the public…Earlier this year, we had some significant damage to one of our [solid waste] facilities, and that ultimately led to trying to essentially put together a program to rebuild those facilities. So I asked Tammie and her team to participate in this CCR thing so we could highlight it in our own budget documents,” Wilson explained.

Director of Otsego County’s Solid Waste and Planning Departments Tammie Harris was invited by Wilson to partake in this series in order to promote communication with the citizenry on the unexpected expenses incurred from the recent transfer facility damages, seeing the situation as the perfect trial run of what a CCR could look like for Otsego County.
“Steve called me up and asked if this was something that we felt like we could participate in,” Harris recounted. “I thought it was a great idea. Outreach is part of what we do in the solid waste program anyway.

“Once I said yes, we were invited to participate in a weekly cohort meeting with others from different areas of the country, representing different types of agencies,” Harris continued. “We all spent time throughout the week developing our report and then going to those weekly meetings and providing feedback and getting ideas from others on how we could present things more clearly.”

Wilson and Harris both partook in this series, which they described as something akin to an educational professional development course. Meetings occurred roughly every Friday for six weeks between October and November—a timeline that worked in Otsego County’s favor by allowing the county to incorporate their product into the 2026 budget season.

Through this series, a comprehensive CCR for the Solid Waste Department was developed. The final product utilizes symbols and statistical metrics to paint a detailed, yet comprehensible picture of how the program is funded, what waste removal totals looked like for 2025, and the implications of the transfer station damages. Harris spoke highly of the cohort series, as being the only representative from a solid waste program present gave her an advantage in making sure her report conveyed everything in a universally understandable manner.

“Having the ability to talk to people like Steve and Tammie who are doing the work of government, not in a large metropolitan area, is really important for our profession,” Stehle shared. “For me as a facilitator of it, I really enjoyed the interaction among the participants. These reports are designed to be publicly available data to tell a story for the public to look at. It’s not designed to just tell positives. It’s designed to say this is what we thought we were going to do and reality hit and not everything goes as planned.”

With the cohort series concluded in late November, Wilson and Harris are both looking to keep this momentum of progress, both speaking to how proud they were of the county’s advances in transparency.

“We’re at the very beginning stages,” Wilson admitted. “For right now, and probably for the next year or two, we’re going to use it as a focusing thing…This could well be the format we use to describe our departments [in the future]…Tammie even had the idea, although I don’t think we’re ready to do this yet, to create this document as a kind of flyer, and when we send out solid waste bills, we include this in the bills, so people know this is what you’re paying for. We’re not there yet. But these are the ideas that we are trying to build.”

Harris said that the Solid Waste Department would be doing outreach regarding their CCR soon, and that there was potential for the department to continue using and updating the format into the future to maintain this newly improved level of communication.

Those interested in reading the Solid Waste Department’s CCR can find it on the department’s page on the Otsego County website or directly at https://cms2.revize.com/revize/otsegocountynynew/Citizen%20Centric%20Report%20Otsego%20County%20Solid%20Waste.pdf?t=202512050911480&t=202512050911480.

For more details regarding AGA and the wider Citizen Centric Report initiative, information can be found at https://www.agacgfm.org/get-involved/awards-scholarships-recognition/citizen-centric-reporting-ccrs/.