Budget openness in Kherson district communities reduced to a formality

The first attempts to find budget documents for 2025 in the communities of the Kherson district show a familiar picture: confusing menus, single search engines, PDF mazes, and formats unsuitable for working with data. There are ten communities and three district councils of Kherson in the district, so we analyze how each of them fulfills the requirements for access to public information.

The Center for Public Investigations conducted an analysis of the accessibility of budget decisions of Kherson district communities.

The law obliges local councils to approve budget decisions and make them open to the public. Documents must be published in machine-readable formats.

Even within the same region, the difference in the usability of websites is striking: some communities try to provide easy access to documents, while others turn this process into a difficult quest.

In the case of military administrations, the situation is different: according to clause 5, part 2, article 15 of the Law "On the Legal Regime of Martial Law," the heads of military administrations have the right to approve local budgets. And clause 8, part 7 of the same article stipulates that their orders are equivalent to decisions of councils and must be made public if they do not contain classified information.

Let's start with Kherson district councils - two of them fully comply with the legal requirements. In Korabelnyi district council, the section 'Regulatory legal acts - Decisions of the VIII convocation' leads to a list of plenary sessions, where the texts of documents and annexes are separately presented. Although they are posted on Google Drive, the formats comply with the norms.

The central district council publishes resolutions in the form of RAR-archives. There is no search engine, but a browser search quickly leads to the necessary files. The text and attachments are in the correct formats.

Among the communities, Oleshkivska and Kherson MBAs are the most compliant with the requirements. On the website of the Oleshkivska ATC, in the section "Orders of the Head...", documents are organized by month. There is no search, but the structure is convenient, the text is in PDF, and the annexes are in open formats. This is one of the few examples where the requirements are not only formally fulfilled.

Kherson MBA offers a similar structure, but also has an internal search. It's easy to find resolutions, although the text and annexes are combined into one PDF, which is convenient for viewing but not for analysis. These communities and district councils are the closest to the normative model of openness.

In most communities, documents are formally available, but the way they are presented makes them difficult to use or contradicts format requirements. For example, in the Velykokopanivska council, the section"Budget 2025" contains all the necessary materials, but they are presented as JPEG images, which completely eliminates their suitability for data processing.

In the Yuvileyna community, the list of documents is also easy to find, but the resolutions and annexes are combined into one PDF and duplicated in JPEG. Neither format is machine-readable. The Muzykivska ATC has a search and provides access to the text and annexes, but everything is in PDF format, which is convenient for reading only.

In the Vynohradiv SBA, documents are grouped by month, and there is no search. The required resolution can be found, but its annexes are not published. In Stanislavska ATC, the situation is slightly better: there is a search, navigation is convenient, but the formats are again limited to PDF. The Bilozerska village council has a similar approach: the text and annexes are posted, but in a single PDF file.

There are also problems among Kherson district councils: in Dniprovskyi district council, relevant documents are not available in the 'Session Decisions' section, they can only be found through the 'District Budget', and again, in a single PDF.

The Chornobaiv community has an 'Orders' menu, but there is no relevant resolution. Only through the 'Budget' section can documents be found, but they are also merged into one PDF.

There are communities where the budget document cannot be found at all. For example, in the Dariivka village council, the 'Resolutions' section does not contain the required resolution, and there is no mention of its existence on the website.

The monitoring shows a significant difference between the level of openness of communities and district councils in Kherson.

Communities of Kherson district no:

• 8 published documents in formats that do not meet the requirements (JPEG, PDF without open data or without attachments);
• 1 community provided incomplete information;
• 1 community did not publish a document at all.

District councils of Kherson city:

• 2 fully complied with the requirements;
• 1 published documents in incorrect formats.

In general, the trend is repeated: communities often fulfill the requirements only "on paper" but do not provide real access to data. The documents are hidden behind complicated navigation, presented in formats unsuitable for analysis, and sometimes missing entirely.

Also, searching for budget documents in the communities of the Kakhovka district often resembles wandering through confusing menus, where each step can be wrong, and the result is usually the same - a PDF in one file or even a JPEG instead of convenient structured data.

Анна Бальчінос