It's true.

The folks who funded our start-up -- the Sam Adams Alliance out of Chicago -- are committed to government transparency. They have created a bevy of wikis devoted to open government, such as the Sunshine Review, which has been grading county government Web sites on how much information they provide online for the taxpayer.

St. Charles Parish, just outside New Orleans, has beefed up its Web site to meet all 10 criteria that the Sunshine Review is using to judge how open county governments are.

From The New Orleans Times-Picayune's Matt Scallan:

The new site also contains more information than the old site, partly in response to a review of the parish's old Web site by the Sunshine Review, a Chicago nonprofit that lobbies for more transparency in government. Simpson said the parish added the parish's budget, audit and other financial information to the site in response to an August 2008 review of the Web sites of Louisiana parishes by the Sunshine Review, which recruits citizens to grade public Web sites on the amount of information they contain.

Simpson said that in response to the critique, which examined the sites of every parish in the state, she put the parish's budget online and is preparing to add information about how to obtain public records from the parish.

Here's the St. Charles Parish page on the Sunshine Review wiki.

Just for fun, here's how some other Texas county Web sites rate:

Harris County.

Tarrant County.

Travis County.

Denton County.

Bexar County.

Dallas County.

Randall County.

Nueces County.

If your county isn't listed above, go to Sunshine Review at this link.

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