County Launches New Service for Government Transparency

By BILL BELLEN
OTSEGO COUNTY

Those who have been following Otsego County Board of Representatives meetings the past few months may have noticed a recurring topic of discussion—Clear Plan. Rep. Andrew Marietta, chair of the Technology and Strategic Planning and Performance Review and Goal Setting committees, has been keeping the board informed on progress toward the public rollout of the Clear Plan program, something that he and Otsego County departmental employees proudly accomplished on Friday, October 10. Representing a major step forward for government transparency within the county, this new software is poised to offer new and insightful understandings of the county government’s goals, strategies, and funding in years to come.

Clear Plan is an additional module of the longstanding budgetary software employed by the county, ClearGov. Described by their website as a program to help “plan, budget, and engage with confidence,” ClearGov is widely utilized by other municipalities and is the official budgeting software of the New York State Association of Counties.

While ClearGov’s primary purpose is to assist in the budget process, the Clear Plan module is focused on the categorization and publication of strategic plans for municipalities and their governmental departments. As conversations around constructing a new, comprehensive, and operational strategic plan for Otsego County began in recent years, the county board and County Administrator Steve Wilson decided Clear Plan was the most effective and efficient service to go with.

“When I first joined the board in 2016, the county had a strategic plan that had been developed and it basically had been put together by a consultant,” Marietta recalled. “That was just this huge document, hundreds of pages long…[Clear Plan] was a conversation that we had in more recent years, when we decided that we really needed to kind of revisit the strategic planning process and develop a more relevant plan.”

Marietta said that county officials already having experience with some of the software due to the agreements in place for the standard ClearGov software was a contributor to the board’s support as a whole for moving forward with the adoption and implementation of Clear Plan. According to Wilson, ClearGov currently costs the county roughly $33,000.00 a year, with Clear Plan adding an extra $12-13,000.00 to this total. The purchasing cost for this year was covered by grants awarded to the county.

Wilson went on to detail how he was hired with the expressed interest of formulating a proper strategic plan.

“We just wanted to be more transparent, and in a particular kind of detailed way,” Wilson said. “You can run financial reports and that sort of stuff, and most people, unless they have a sense for accounting or stuff like that, it’s not very meaningful to them. So we started probably in ‘24, maybe in ‘23, building out a strategic plan. But our strategic plan was by each department, and it was more like an operational plan. And what we’re trying to get departments to convey is what they’re actually doing. And so the Clear Plan software that we talk about captures that.”

Over the past year, Wilson has encouraged department and office directors to formulate and upload their respective strategic plans to Clear Plan to build a comprehensive overview of the goals of each section of the county government and their progress each quarter. For this period, all information and data was kept private in order to give officials time to build an understanding of how to use the new software in a systemized and effective manner.

Though Wilson stated that not all facets of Clear Plan are quite ready—such as an idealized “dollars to strategic plan elements” that would display exactly where residents’ tax dollars are being spent—he and the board believe that the upcoming budget season is sufficient reason for its current publication.

Some department leaders have jumped head first into developing comprehensive portions of Clear Plan to represent their operations. Tamie Reed, director of the Otsego County Office for the Aging, shared how she has adapted to using the new program.

“We use the tool to track the progress of our strategic plan goals and share that information with our staff, Advisory Council, program participants, members of the public, and the county board. Not only does it keep those stakeholders informed of the priorities that our office is working on, but it helps them to see the progress we are making and the barriers we sometimes face in reaching those goals,” Reed explained.

“Clear Plan has been an easy tool to implement that allows us to stay on track and update action steps…It also has given us a means to share this information with the public much more easily, which we didn’t have before,” Reed said.

Not all members of the county government have been as eager to add this new management system to their checklist of things to do. 

Otsego County Treasurer Allen Ruffles shared, “I personally don’t use the plan in my office because we just collect taxes for residents. We manage a lot of back-office stuff for other departments who work with residents, but we do well managing that on our own. We manage all the county’s finances, health insurance, investments, etc. So I don’t use it because it’s almost a waste of my time to do it, since I just support departments.”

Regardless of varying internal enthusiasm for Clear Plan, Wilson and Marietta both pointed out how vital they believe its increased transparency will be, given the restraints of the impending budget process.

“There’s a whole bunch of federal budget cuts coming in, having to do a lot of times with what you might call the social safety net,” Wilson shared. “One of the decisions that will eventually face us is should local taxpayers take on part of that? That might involve raising taxes. Maybe it might involve [budget cuts to] other things we already know they like, like law enforcement, snow plowing. I mean, you don’t really want to cut snow plowing here, you know. So, those would be difficult decisions and we think it’s important for the public to be as…knowledgeable about that as possible.”

Though Clear Plan certainly does not offer a solution to the compounding budgetary problems facing Otsego County and counties statewide, many members of county government are adamant that they believe it has the potential to play a major role in how very challenging decisions of the future are made.

Those interested in reading the strategic plan—or reviewing the many accompanying graphs, statistics, and progress bars now available through Clear Plan—can access it through the strategic plan menu on Otsego County’s official website or directly through the link at https://county-otsego-ny-cleardoc.cleargov.com/9844/288932/d. 

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