Only three communities in Bereziv district informed about the budget properly

The websites of only three of the 16 communities in the Berezivskyi district of Odesa region have clear navigation, search, and documents in a machine-readable format.

This assessment was made by experts from the Center for Public Investigations based on their own research.

These are the Novokalchevska, Staromayakivska and Konoplyanska communities.

"These councils show that openness can be simple and convenient for people," the authors of the study note.

On the website of the Znamianske village council, the budget decision had to be searched for among Roman numerals and missing dates, and the researchers eventually found a scanned PDF. The situation is the same in the Velykobuyalytska community: instead of individual documents, there are packages of decisions in a format inaccessible for analysis.

Although the Stryukiv council publishes decisions, the annexes to them are in Word, which does not meet the standards. The real problem, according to experts, is in communities where there are no budget decisions at all. Among them are Rozkvitivska, Petrovirivska, Chohodarivska, Mykolaivska and Raukhivska. Some websites are simply empty, some documents end in 2020, and in the Chohodariv community, even the special section "Budget-2025" was empty. The situation was complicated by bureaucratic confusion: Chernivtsi village council still appears on the Internet as Andriyevo-Ivanivka village council, which makes it difficult to find the right solutions.

According to the study of 16 communities in the district:

• Three fully comply with the requirements of the law;
• Two submitted documents in inappropriate formats;
• Three published only part of the decisions;
• Seven did not provide access at all;
• One website could not be found.

Meanwhile, the Center for Public Investigations has launched a series of studies of community websites, which will result in publications with the results of these studies.

Кирило Бойко