
On Friday, Madison365 published “current” information from the City of Madison website that now appears to be more than eight years old.
On Friday, in a piece about Boys and Girls Club CEO Michael Johnson’s questioning the timing of a City audit, City of Madison Community Development Director Jim O’Keefe told Madison365 that community center audits were scheduled based on which received the most federal funding. O’Keefe said he did not have immediate access to the specific dollar amounts each community center received, so Madison365’s reporter searched the City of Madison’s website for the information.
The only information readily available on the City website, which is clearly labelled as “current activity,” indicated that the Boys and Girls Club Allied Drive center received $25,000 in federal funding, the smallest amount of any community center, which would suggest the Club was audited years ahead of schedule.
However, that figure came from data that “is clearly way out of date,” O’Keefe said Tuesday.
In fact, the Boys and Girls Club now receives $121,400 in federal Community Development Block Grant funds for its Allied Drive and Taft Street centers, the most of any local community center agency. On Tuesday O’Keefe provided a list of all City-funded community centers and their funding sources, including both City and federal funds.
That information is not readily available on the City website, O’Keefe said, except in the full list of authorized contracts in the City’s full operating budget, specifically on the second page of the Community Development Division’s operating budget overview.
The outdated page, at cityofmadison.com/cdbg, appears to have been published in 2009. It was still easily available on the City website as of Wednesday morning and is still the top Google result for the search “Madison CDBG” and the top result for the search CDBG on the City of Madison website.
“I don’t know why this is still up,” O’Keefe said of the outdated information.