The Arkansas Center for Research in Economics released its County and City Web Transparency Report, Access Arkansas in April of 2023.

Conway was awarded the Access Arkansas Sunshine Award for exemplary government transparency by the organization. 

The city ranked as the number three performer in local government web transparency, sitting with Fayetteville and Springdale.

Jeremy Horpedahl, ACRE director and associate professor of economics, said, “Conway was actually tied for first place with two other cities, Springdale and Fayetteville. They all had a perfect score on our index.”

Conway was one of three cities awarded the Sunshine Award because they received a perfect score in all three of the areas that are measured: fiscal, political, and administrative transparency. 

“Government transparency is the ability of citizens to have access to relevant information about the operations of their government such as how their tax dollars are being spent and what is being discussed at government meetings,” Horpedahl said. 

“Transparency is important because, first of all, the citizens pay for and choose who runs their local government, so they need to know what is going on to be effective voters. Transparency also creates trust between citizens and their government, which leads to a better functioning government.” 

Horpedahl added that fiscal transparency is the disclosure of financial information to citizens, such as budgets and financial statements. 

Administrative transparency relates to the openness of local officials’ activities and processes. Political transparency relates to the openness and accessibility of elected officials and of the legislative activities and processes conducted in the quorum courts. 

According to ConwayArkansas.gov, “The report assesses the information that county and city governments publish online, as well as how accessible that information is. Localities are then ranked according to this analysis.” 

Michael Stoll, ACRE communications manager said, “Research shows that transparency increases accountability, instills fiscal discipline, improves economic performance, promotes trust between government and citizens, and reduces corruption.” 

Horpedahl said, “The award was created to recognize Arkansas cities and counties that are excelling at being transparent and putting important information online for their citizens to access.”

“The awards were first given out in 2023, but we have been measuring county government transparency since 2018. We have had several counties reach out to us over the years to understand how they can improve transparency and their score in our ranking, and 2023 was the first year we scored cities,” he said 

The process of examining and gathering the data is quite extensive. 

Horpedahl and Kalulu said the first step is collecting the data. 

Student workers go through the county and city websites to locate specific information considered important and included in the index. 

“They assign a [score of] one if the information is present and a zero if they cannot find the information within a specified time,” Horpedahl. 

The second step is preliminary sub-indexes calculation. After data collection, the information collected by all the student workers is combined to calculate the score for each type of transparency. 

The third step is collecting feedback or input from the local government. ACRE contacts each county and city, providing them with preliminary findings and requesting that they verify the work. 

This step is also taken to get the local government engaged in the process so they can be encouraged to adjust. 

The fourth and final step is the recalculation of the sub-indexes and the overall index. 

At this stage of the process, ACRE incorporates the feedback from the counties and cities to recalculate the scores.

Because Conway had a perfect score on the ACRE index, there is nothing more the city can do to improve its score. 

Horpedahl said, “But there are always ways to improve transparency that go beyond our index.”