What is the Open Government Grade?

It’s a letter grade, A through F, that BeaverCountian.com gives every municipality, every public school district and the county government in Beaver County. It measures one thing: how easy each government makes it for taxpayers to see what their elected officials are doing in public meetings.

Each government’s grade appears on its page in our Community Dashboards.

Why grade governments on this?

Meeting minutes are the official record of what your elected officials did with your money and in your name. Every local government in Pennsylvania is required to keep them. But how easy they are to find, and how much they actually tell you, varies wildly depending on where you live.

In one town, you can look up exactly how your council member voted on every bill. A few miles away, you can’t find out whether your council even met. We think taxpayers deserve to know which kind of government they have.

How is the grade calculated?

Every government is scored out of 100 points, based only on the records it makes public:

  • Votes recorded (30 points): do the minutes say how each official voted, or just that a motion “carried”?
  • Current minutes (25 points): how far behind are the posted minutes? Boards normally approve each set of minutes at their next meeting, so a government gets full credit when its latest posted minutes are no more than two meetings behind, plus three weeks to post them (never less than 60 days). A board that meets monthly and one that meets twice a month are each measured against their own schedule.
  • Archive (15 points): how many years of past minutes are still available on the government’s own website?
  • Attendance (10 points): do the minutes record who was there?
  • Agendas (10 points): are agendas posted before meetings?
  • Searchable records (10 points): are the minutes real documents, or photographs of paper that can’t be searched? A government whose minutes are scans can still earn these points if it offers a public online search of the full text of its minutes or of the resolutions recorded in them.

Votes and attendance are measured across every meeting since January 2024, not just the latest one.

How are votes scored?

A vote earns full credit when the minutes show how each official voted: by name, by roll call, or by stating that the vote was unanimous or that all members were in favor.

A vote earns half credit when the minutes record who made and seconded the motion and that it passed or failed, but not how each member voted, as long as the minutes also record who attended that meeting. Readers can tell who was in the room and that no objection was written down, but not for certain how each person voted.

A vote earns no credit when the minutes give only the result, or don’t say who was there.

What do the letter grades mean?

  • A: 90 to 100
  • B: 80 to 89
  • C: 70 to 79
  • D: 60 to 69
  • F: below 60

Why do some governments get an automatic F?

A government that posts no meeting minutes online gets an F and a score of zero, no matter what else it does. That includes governments with no website, a website that doesn’t work, or a website that posts agendas but never the minutes themselves.

Without minutes, residents have no way to see what their officials discussed or how they voted without filing a Right-to-Know request.

The same goes for a government that has stopped posting. If a government hasn’t posted new minutes in more than a year, it gets an F, with its score capped at 59, even if older minutes are still online.

Every government that does post minutes gets the grade its score earns. A government can still fail if its records are poor enough, but only by scoring below 60 under the same rules as everyone else.

Does every government get graded the same way?

Yes. Every government is scored with the same formula, and there are no exceptions in either direction. We don’t raise or lower anyone’s grade by hand.

Some local boards hold work sessions or workshops in addition to their voting meetings. Because not every government holds them, and some only hold them occasionally, governments are not graded on whether they post work session minutes.

Does a good grade mean a government is doing a good job?

No. The grade doesn’t measure whether a government spends wisely, makes good decisions or treats residents fairly. It only measures whether taxpayers can see what it’s doing. A government can earn an A and still make decisions you disagree with. The difference is that you’ll be able to find out about them.

Where does the information come from?

Everything comes from each government’s own public records, mostly the meeting minutes and agendas it posts on its website. Where a government’s older minutes aren’t online, our archive may include copies BeaverCountian.com obtained separately, but the grade is based on what the government itself makes available.

How do you read all those minutes?

No one person could read thousands of sets of meeting minutes by hand, so we use an AI system to help. It’s built on a large language model, the same kind of technology behind today’s AI chat assistants. It downloads each government’s minutes, converts scanned pages into searchable text and reads each meeting to pull out who attended, what was voted on and how each official voted.

We don’t trust any single reading. Every meeting is read twice, independently, and a program compares the two readings line by line. It also checks them against basic arithmetic and common sense: do the named votes add up to the printed tally, and did anyone vote at a meeting the roll call says they missed?

When anything doesn’t match, the meeting is held back and checked against the original document. A BeaverCountian.com journalist reviews the results and makes the final calls before anything is published.

How often are grades updated?

We check every government we track for new minutes and agendas each day, and add them to our Meetings & Votes archive as they’re posted. Grades are reviewed periodically and updated when a government’s records improve or slip.

How can a government improve its grade?

It’s simple, and it doesn’t cost anything:

  • Post the minutes of every public meeting, including work sessions.
  • Post them promptly, as soon as they’re approved.
  • Record attendance at every meeting.
  • Record how each member voted on every motion, by name.
  • Post agendas before meetings.
  • Post typed, searchable documents instead of scans, and keep past years online.

I think a grade is wrong. What should I do?

If you believe we’ve missed records a government has posted, or made a mistake in how we’ve read them, please contact us. Tell us which government it is and where the records can be found. If we got something wrong, we’ll correct it and update the grade.