Nevada premiers easy-to-read Recovery report

Recovery.gov will change today, or at least the information on the site will. Today, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board posts a final set of corrections for reports filed in January.

Continued tweaks to the site don't come as a surprise to Nevada's controller Kim Wallin. She told Federal News Radio that reporting recovery data has been a learning process full of change from the very beginning.

I think it was a guesstimate as far as the number of jobs, especially in the first quarter. We found that the guidance that the state was receiving kept changing, not just by the week, but by the day, by the hour it seemed. And then in the second quarter when we did the reporting, then they came out with a new change in how to report the jobs. And I know that some of our agencies were saying "we don't have the resources to change our calculation right now to do it this way." So this next quarter going in, the end of March I think, then we'll finally be all on the same page.

Wallin said Nevada then took the information and produced a two page summary of "how we've spent our stimulus dollars, where we're at in the process of spending them," based on reports the state had already been sharing with citizens.

"About three years ago," said Wallin, "we had started producing a citizen-centric report for our citizens to show where we get our money from, where we spend it, and we put it into a four page format. And we thought it would be a good opportunity to do the same with the stimulus money."

In creating the summary, Nevada has become the first state to issue their own scaled-down, citizen-centric stimulus report.

Wallin said the state plans to continue the ARRA summaries every quarter.

It's the same information that we're reporting to the federal government. The only difference is instead of just being in a spreadsheet format with lots of different numbers, we actually put some words in there and explain things to the citizens of what it means.

Wallin said raw data isn't enough to serve the public.

I've been a proponent of having data that is meaningful to the citizens, and right now, in the format that the data's in in our website and even the federal website, the recovery.gov website, it's just a lot of numbers and it doesn't really tell you the story about what's happening with this money and who have we been helping. And I think that the stories are more important than just the numbers. I think that's more important for the citizens. They can relate to the stories better than just numbers.

The summary also addresses ongoing projects, Build America Bonds, and spotlights recipient programs like the state's Early Intervention Services. Wallin said the next report will "talk about other projects coming down the pike" and possible award opportunities.