The state of Washington has met its deadline for producing a Web site that gives visitors detailed information about the state budget. It’s a good start (if you’re a budget wonk who speaks fluent spreadsheet), but it needs refinement.

Assuming that refinement will happen, congratulations to the Legislative Evaluation and Accountability Program Committee, which rolled out the site this week. You can find it at fiscal.wa.gov, replete with graphs, charts and links.

But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, you’d better plan to spend some time exploring the site and learning how to navigate it. It will help if you know the terminology and the bureaucratic structure that is second nature to those who assemble state budgets.

Under legislation passed last spring – unanimously in both houses, for what it’s worth – LEAP and the governor’s budget office were to create a Web site where searchers could find an array of detailed information about revenues and expenditures, caseloads and performance measures.

That kind of information and more can be found at fiscal.wa.gov, a site that will help to convert open government from a noble democratic concept to a practical reality. Holding government accountable requires convenient access to useful information about how resources are spent.

Not that the public didn’t already have access to that kind of information; it’s the “convenient” part that has been the challenge.

A conservative think tank, the Washington Policy Center, was among the strongest proponents of the legislation that required the Web site to be set up by January 2009. An official for the organization conceded that “the site has more appeal to policy wonks and media than anyone else.”

But those were the people who had a head start when it came to digging out information about state spending and revenue collection. Ultimately, the merit of the site is that it will give residents at large an easy way to do their own fact-finding.

LEAP, a bipartisan and independent body that does fiscal analysis and research for legislative budget writers, got high marks from the Washington Policy Center for taking on the task within its own budget. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Redmond-based Microsoft was eager to lend some expertise at a time when rival Google was getting attention for similar work in other states.

But the job, impressive as it is, is unfinished until the promise of easy public acquisition of complex budget information is realized.