Committee continues debate on payment-register ordinance after questions over redactions and data fields

The Finance and Economic Development Standing Committee on Tuesday continued Ordinance 2026-081, a proposed change to the city code that would alter how the city publishes its payment register, citing unresolved questions about privacy redactions, which data fields to publish, and the resource burden of monthly disclosure.

Lawson Woje Seria, identified in the transcript as the administration's chief of staff, told the committee the FY25 payment register preparation began May 4 and concluded with publication on June 22 after about seven weeks of work. He said the published dataset contained 231,933 rows; roughly 34% of records were eligible for formulaic redaction and about 152,000 rows required manual departmental review, resulting in 2,799 partial redactions, or about 1.2% of records.

"We wanted to share some data," Seria said in the presentation, describing the staff effort and the proposed ordinance changes. He said the administration is proposing to publish transaction-level data aligned with budget account and cost-center codes, apply FOIA exemptions when appropriate, and require supervisory review for discretionary redactions so that protected data are excluded at the source rather than removed after publication.

Council member Gibson pressed administration staff on the balance between privacy and transparency, noting the FY25 dataset in the open-data download showed extensive redactions. "The information that has now been published is highly redacted," Gibson said, adding that about $50,000,000 had been redacted under social-services legal provisions and roughly $2.8 million under discretionary FOIA exemptions.

Finance Director Leticia Shelton testified that some fields (for example, check numbers, wire numbers or electronic transfer IDs) are not standardized and historically have contained sensitive digits; she said the department did not see a need to publish those fields in their raw form. Director Charles Todd (DIT) said p-card transactions are present in the register but are recorded as payments to Bank of America; the distribution column can be used to identify the merchant in many cases.

Several members urged the administration to preserve fields that aid public transparency, such as distribution or invoice descriptions, or to clarify how aggregated totals and per-line distribution amounts would be presented so a single redacted line would not force a wider suppression of invoice detail.

Because the administration provided proposed amendments that had not yet been reviewed by the city attorney and committee members requested written responses to specific questions about field inclusion and redaction logic, the committee voted to continue Ordinance 2026-081 to the Aug. 19 Finance and Economic Development Standing Committee meeting to allow amendments and legal review. The clerk recorded Aye votes from Miss Lynch, Vice Chair Jones and Chair Robinson and announced the motion approved.

The committee also advanced a separate resolution (Resolution 2026-R019) to council with no recommendation to authorize an investigation into the city's failure to publish a monthly payment register as required by city code; members said counsel review would help the body and the public better understand what the administration now plans to publish and why some information was redacted in the FY25 dataset.

Next steps: the administration intends to work with the city attorney to refine and introduce amendments before the ordinance returns to committee; members requested written answers to outstanding questions and copies of the proposed amendments before the next meeting.