McMinnville rolls out OpenBook transparency portal; council asks for forecasting and vendor-level detail

Finance Director Katie Henry demonstrated McMinnville's new OpenBook transparency portal at a council work session and asked councilors and the public for feedback on the data and views they want published.

Henry said the portal currently relies on a static upload (data through Aug. 13) because the daily interface with the city's Tyler Technologies accounting software is still being built. "As of right now, it's a stagnant interface where we have to do an upload to get the data," Henry said. Staff said daily updates will be added once the vendor completes the integration.

The portal lets users drill into adopted budgets by fund and department, view expense classifications (personnel, materials and services), download CSV exports and view budget-to-actual comparisons. Henry demonstrated a general-fund drilldown showing a $32.6 million expense budget and a year-to-date spend figure that staff had uploaded.

Councilors generally welcomed the portal and asked for two additions: (1) forecast and projection tools that show how year-to-date spending lines compare to where the city should be through each month (staff said the software supports weighted monthly trends and forecasting); and (2) clarity about how granular the public-facing view should be versus internal staff-facing detail. Councilor Cunningham asked whether the portal could present projections showing whether departments are on track with their budgets; Henry said the system can support forecasts that account for seasonality and that staff plans to build monthly-weighted projections.

Councilors also asked for guidance on the vendor-level and transaction-level detail to publish publicly versus internal-only views. Henry said staff will continue training, can create internal logins for detailed views, and will gather council feedback via the portal's feedback button.

Why it matters: The portal provides a public-facing way to understand how tax and fee revenues are budgeted and spent, and councilors want the portal to support near-term budget oversight with current-year projections.

Next steps: Staff will pursue the Tyler integration to enable daily data updates, develop forecasting dashboards with weighted monthly trends, and propose a publication policy that balances transparency with staff workload and privacy or procurement concerns.