The State Treasurer’s Office (STO) is publicly announcing on Tuesday a new open data website that dives deep on the $1.5 trillion in debt issued by state and local government during the past three decades.
DebtWatch presents data that was previously only available in a spreadsheet kept by the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission (CDIAC). According to the STO, the data from 1984 to the present includes 2.8 million fields of data and 52,000 records.
DebtWatch, at debtwatch.treasurer.ca.gov/, is similar to websites such as http://publicpay.ca.gov/ that State Treasurer John Chiang launched when he used to be State Controller. Treasurer’s Office IT director Jan Ross held a similar post at the Controller’s Office when Chiang was there, and she’s planning to implement a similar type of open data program and digital initiative for the state treasury.
Earlier this year, Ross, who came to the Treasurer’s Office in January, was approved to hire five additional staff members to work on website development, with plans to transform the State Treasurer’s Office website into an Amazon-style experience that’s easy to use and readily searchable. The new team’s staff formerly worked for Ross at the Controller’s Office, she said.
In the meantime, one of those five positions — a testing manager — worked on DebtWatch, which was developed predominantly through a one-time build done by Socrata. The project took about six months, Ross said, after the contract was signed in late April.
DebtWatch is purposely designed to be accessible to non-techies — “rated ‘E’ for everyone,” as Ross called it. The website is searchable by the type of debt issuer — state, cities, counties, special districts and others — or debt issued county by county.
“We could have released this just like data catalog — a standard open data portal — but the Treasurer has been committed all along to putting really interactive user interfaces on top of this data,” Ross said Monday. “So that it’s not just relegated to data scientists or researchers, but the average user could say, ’How much debt is in my community?’”
