Suppose you want, as a taxpayer in Somervell County, to see exactly how various monies are spent. The way to do that, in any government arena, is by looking at the check registers (and also credit card information, if applicable). In the past, Somervell County auditor's department put check registers on the Somervell County website but at some point, not sure when, that practice stopped. Recently, I have had reason to want to look at check registers, which are broken down by department. I asked Michelle Reynolds, the Somervell County Clerk, about where they were and found out that they are not included in the agenda packet that gets sent out, but were scanned after the meeting and added to the website. After this last meeting, I went looking for the check registers and they were, to put it mildly, not intuitive to find, pretty much buried levels deep with no link or description to indicate where they were. 

I brought this up to John Curtis, Somervell County Commissioner for Precinct 2,  and also to Brian Watts. I expressed my opinion that it would be great if the check registers (and the budget transfers, for that matter) were easy to find by being either duplicated or moved. Brian said that he also has been working to implement this on the new revision of the website.

Got an email from Brian a while ago and this is being done. Here's the link and note also that FINANCE is a top level menu item on the Somervell County website. And, below that are PDF files of the check registers that go back, at this present time, into 2016.

What this means for all of us as taxpayers is that, in the interest of transparency, Somervell County has made it much easier to be able to look and see exactly how our monies are being spent. A big thank you to Brian and John!