Josh Mandel & Fineas Baxandall:

An open government is one in which citizens are empowered to hold their elected officials accountable. Even in today’s atmosphere of hyper-partisanship, leaders from across the political spectrum can agree that advancing the cause of transparency is integral for enabling taxpayers to follow the money.

In 2010, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) developed a scorecard to grade all 50 states’ online-transparency initiatives, and specifically how well they provide public access to checkbook-level spending data. The goal was to spark competition that would inspire, motivate and in some cases publicly pressure state-government leaders across the country to improve the transparency of their fiscal operations.

U.S. PIRG’s state rankings for 2015 were recently released, and nowhere was there a better turnaround story than in Ohio. Two years ago, Ohio had received a grade of D-plus. Taken aback by that grade — which dropped again in 2014, to D-minus — the Ohio treasurer’s office (led by one of the authors of this column, state Treasurer Josh Mandel) set out to meet and even surpass best practices for making budgets, contracts, subsidies and “off-budget” expenditures open to public scrutiny. That effort has paid off dramatically, raising the state’s transparency ranking from a dismal 46th last year to first in the nation in 2015, with Ohio earning the first-ever A-plus grade.