NITRO, W.Va. — A new online portal showing how the city of Nitro is spending funds went live on Tuesday.
The West Virginia State Auditor’s Office offered the tool as part of Project Mountaineer, a statewide initiative focused on providing county commissions and municipalities with financial reporting software. The website includes information regarding the city’s budget, revenues and transactions.
“What this means is that everybody in the city of Nitro will have access to all of the state’s accounting information in real time the same way that everybody up here does,” State Auditor J.B. McCuskey told the Nitro City Council during its Tuesday evening meeting. “What this means for everybody up here is that you will now have access to your own city’s budget data in a way you never had before.”
The online portal shows the city’s revised budget is around $11.4 million, of which 36.6% of the funding is focused on public safety.
McCuskey also noted the timing of the portal as municipalities spend federal coronavirus relief money.
“We don’t have the luxury of this money going to nowhere again,” he said. “Every 10 years or so, there is a bunch of federal money that comes into West Virginia, and five years later, everybody in the whole state says ‘What did we do with that money? Where did it go?'”
The Kanawha County Commission entered the program in April. Nitro is the first Kanawha County city with a portal.