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Budget committee previews contracts dashboard, affirms plan to publish contracts online
Summary
The Budget and Fiscal Advisory Committee previewed a new public dashboard that will display the commission’s contracts and funding allocations and discussed making full contract documents available online; staff said a completed tool and more contract detail will be delivered at the September meeting.
The Budget and Fiscal Advisory Committee of the Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission previewed a new contracts and spending dashboard and discussed steps to make individual contracts and related materials available online.
Committee members and staff said the dashboard will show how Behavioral Health Student Services Act (BHSSA) and other funds are allocated and will include tabs for local assistance, administrative, and evaluation expenditures. Norma Pate, deputy director of administrative services and performance management, apologized that underlying materials were not available before the meeting and said staff are completing a Tableau-based dashboard for public release at the commission's September meeting.
Pate told the committee the display will include an overall breakdown of program dollars and, when complete, a listing of the commission's contracts linked to each funding category. “We have local assistance, administrative funds, and evaluation funds for our BHSSA grant program,” Pate said, and added that the dashboard will include “all of the contracts that we have” and drop-down menus for each local assistance program. She asked for commissioners’ input after staff finish embedding and validating the data.
Committee members urged staff to go beyond a contracts index and make contract documents and procurement details readable online. A vice chair asked whether the tool could include not only contract names but also a way to click through to the contract text; Pate said staff will “explore that option” with IT, acknowledging technical limits in Tableau and promising to pursue ways to make contract documents available.
Members of the public who spoke during the meeting urged the committee to publish contracts in full. Stacy Hiramoto of REMCO, the Racial and Ethnic Mental Health Disparities Coalition, thanked staff for outreach and requested meeting materials be posted before meetings. Laurel Ben Hamada of the Muslim American Society Social Services Foundation said she had difficulty locating a different public contract online and applauded efforts to post contracts and supporting documents.
Pate said the commission manages roughly 198 contracts that will be represented in the dashboard and reiterated the staff target to finalize the public-facing tool by September. She noted the dashboard currently shows preliminary figures for BHSSA: roughly $285,000,000 in local assistance, $25,000,000 for program administration and $16,600,000 for evaluation (staff said some “expended” figures remain under review). Pate asked commissioners to reserve detailed technical questions for the September deep dive when validated numbers and contract-level details will be available.
The discussion also touched on whether procurement scoring information could be posted. Committee staff said they will research any legal or policy limits on publishing scoring or ratings but acknowledged public interest in seeing awardees, RFPs, and metrics.
The committee did not take formal action solely on the dashboard at this meeting; staff said they will return with the completed public tool and additional contract-level recommendations at the next scheduled meeting.
The presentation and public comments underscored a committee priority to improve fiscal transparency and make contract information more accessible to stakeholders and the public.
