Campaign Priority
Open books. Clear records. No surprises — and here is exactly what that means.
Almost everything the Treasurer's office does is a public record today. Transparency isn't a promise to comply with the law — that's the floor, and every officeholder is standing on it. The real question is narrower: can an ordinary resident find the answer without filing a request, hiring anyone, or knowing who to call?
Three different people need three different things from this office, and all three deserve a straight answer:
The taxpayer wants to know what they owe, whether their payment posted, and why the bill changed. The districts — schools, fire, water, the towns — need to know their apportionment arrived, in full, on the day it was supposed to. Everyone else is entitled to know what the county is holding, where it's invested, what it earned, and what the office costs to run.
Douglas County isn't starting from zero on any of this. The Treasurer's office publishes monthly and annual reports, posts its investment policy and portfolio reports, puts tax lien records and datasets online, runs a searchable map showing where a parcel's taxes actually go, and takes questions by phone, email, and live chat. Tim's commitment is to keep all of it, make it easier to use, and hold the standard in the years when nobody happens to be watching.
There's a fourth piece of honesty that matters just as much. Your property tax bill comes from the Treasurer, so the Treasurer is who people call when it goes up. But the Treasurer didn't raise it. Your value was set by the Assessor; your rate is the sum of mill levies set by each district that taxes you. A transparent Treasurer's office says so plainly, and points you at the office that made the decision — while there's still time to be heard about it. Sending residents away confused isn't neutrality. It's a favor to whoever made the call.
The office already posts monthly reports, tax district revenue reports, portfolio management reports, and annual collections and disbursements reports. Tim will keep every one of them and push on the next step: a predictable schedule, and formats a resident or a district's finance officer can actually download and work with, rather than a scanned image that defeats searching. Routine publication is what makes a records request unnecessary in the first place.
A single document a resident can read in ten minutes: what came in, where it went, what it earned, what the office cost to operate, and what changed from last year. Written for taxpayers, not for auditors. If it needs a glossary, it isn't finished.
The county already runs a searchable map showing exactly which authorities a given parcel's taxes are split among. Most residents have never heard of it. Tim will point every tax statement, every online account lookup, and every phone call at that answer — which entities levied what share, who sets each of those rates, and where to be heard while the window is still open. The Treasurer's office is where most people first meet their tax increase; that's exactly why the explanation belongs there.
Calls and emails answered within one business day by a person who signs their name to the answer. When the answer is no, it comes with the reason and the rule behind it. "That's just how it works" is not an answer taxpayers should have to accept from an office holding their money.
Douglas County posts its auction rules, advertised property lists, lien datasets, and the record of each year's sale. Good. This is the corner of the office where insider knowledge would be worth the most, which is precisely why none of it can ever become insider knowledge — the list, the rules, the bidding procedure, and afterward the results, published every year without anyone having to ask.
"You shouldn't have to know somebody to find out what happened to your money. If it takes a records request, we've already failed."Tim Dietz
In any office, transparency decays quietly rather than collapsing. The reports get thinner. The format gets harder to use. The office answers the questions it's asked and volunteers nothing, and technically nothing is wrong.
What fills the silence is suspicion. Residents assume the worst about an office they can't see into, and in fairness, they have no way to rule it out. Districts stop trusting figures they can't verify. And genuine mistakes — the ordinary kind that happen in any office moving this much money — sit undiscovered for years, until fixing one costs many times what catching it would have.
Public money should be the easiest money in the world to look at. Tim intends to run the office that way from day one.
Three commitments, all tied to what the office actually does.