Transparency will help districts save money as taxpayers help identify competitive vendors and purchasing efficiencies. Following are just a sample of certain departments with larger non-personnel expenses, and for some departments, budget items within those departments.
Another way taxpayers can help through transparency is helping the district identify credit card charge inefficiencies and savings. These credit card records were attained under the Colorado Open Records Act, and the employees names have been deleted. This is one category, for one month, April 2008. This one category, apparently for refreshments, routinely has over $20,000/month charged to it. There were a total of 11,452 individual charges for April 2008 alone for over $2,000,000 -- some of it might have been reimbursed, but a reconciliation of reimbursed and non-reimbursed would be helpful and would be accomplished with transparency.