What's at stake:
Four months after Fresno city leaders unanimously approved reforms following a two-part Fresnoland investigation, a new public transparency portal appears to be close to the finish line.
Back in January, on the heels of a two-part Fresnoland investigation that exposed gaps in the City of Fresno’s contracting laws and its transparency with the public, city electeds promised change.
The Fresno City Council unanimously voted to close two loopholes in the city’s contracting laws and also establish the city’s first ever public transparency portal that would make city contracts, along with a number of other city reports and disclosures, easily accessible to the public.
About four months later, city officials may be close to fulfilling that promise.
The public transparency portal appears to be functional through a beta test page on the City of Fresno’s website. So far, it allows members of the public to search for the name of companies and contractors to view their city contracts and agreements.
It also allows members of the public to search for city ordinances, resolutions and city council minutes.
On Thursday, Interim City Clerk Amy Aller will lead a workshop for city officials and the wider public about her office’s progress so far in creating the transparency portal.
“I think we’re going to be working on honing in on some more specific categories and making sure that things are ported over,” Aller told Fresnoland in a Wednesday morning interview. “From where we started to where we are now, we are very close to having something that’s going to be very usable for the public.”
Aller said getting to this beta test stage required rounding up tens of thousands of documents in different city systems. She added that it also wouldn’t have been possible without collaboration with the city’s Information Services Department.
“This is going to be an ongoing project, and as people begin using it and we start getting feedback, we’ll be able to make more specific adjustments,” Aller said.
Since the portal is still in a beta test stage, not all of its features and city disclosures are up and running just yet. Some of those disclosures are already listed elsewhere on the City of Fresno website.
However, the resolution that city officials approved in January required those documents to be available “at a single location on the City’s website accessible to the public and searchable.”
The beta test page also returns search results for the salaries of top city officials by specific calendar years. However, salary documents for top officials beyond the 2021 calendar year don’t show up in search results.
Aller said the portal is not complete yet and she said the team behind it will be incorporating feedback. Eventually, the portal will be at a stage ready for feedback from the public.
“I don’t think we’re there yet, but that’s definitely something that we want to include as a way to get information as to how the system is working,” Aller said.
The current beta test version of the public transparency portal, Aller said, was the result of months of work across different city departments.
Back in January, city leaders began talking about a model of transparency at the City of San Diego — which was prominently featured in Fresnoland’s investigation.
The City of San Diego’s website has an accessible and easy-to-scan website listing all consultants with city contracts over $25,000 going back more than a decade. Its website doesn’t require searching for any information, and clearly lays out all contracts year by year along with the value of each along with a project description, too.
Fresno city leaders even talked about San Diego’s model for transparency on the dais a few months ago.
Councilmember Miguel Arias, who sponsored the January reforms to create a public transparency portal, told Fresnoland in a Monday interview that he thinks Fresno’s transparency portal should have the same level of information as the model in San Diego.
“What I’m going to look for is how close does the portal, as currently designed, meet the ultimate transparency test that we should be striving for,” Arias told Fresnoland. “If it doesn’t, then on Thursday we’ll say we want additional features and then go ahead and proceed.”
Arias added that the public transparency portal should accessibly list all no-bid contracts along with the contractor’s name, the date it was approved and its total amount. The resolution that city officials approved in January only requires contracts worth less than $100,000.
Those limitations would exclude contracts like the ones that former Councilmember Luis Chavez gave to a consulting company run by political consultant Alex Tavlian.
According to the Fresno City Attorney’s Office, Chavez violated Fresno City Code multiple times since 2023 by awarding several contracts to Tavlian’s company worth $100,000 or less without getting city council approval.
Arias said he is going to figure out whether another resolution would need to be brought forward to expand transparency to all no-bid contracts regardless of how much they’re worth. He also said he’d ask the City Clerk’s Office for a timeline on how long it would take for the portal to have that kind of information.
Arias said he hopes the public transparency portal is soon fully functional. He thinks that’s likely, since the city isn’t relying on the services of a third-party company.
He also wants to make sure that the City Clerk’s Office is able to make improvements to the transparency portal without needing council approval for each and every change.
Update: This article has been updated with comments from Interim City Clerk Amy Aller. During her Thursday workshop, she said the public transparency portal should ready for use by the public by June 2026.
