As a policy researcher, Noah Yee Yick knows more about keeping tabs on the San Diego County budget than the typical resident.

But the sprawling document, hundreds of pages long, can vex even a professional researcher like Yee Yick.

After the county released the budget in May, Yee Yick combed the pages trying to confirm that it still would fund a legal aid program for detained immigrants. But the document can be sparse on those kinds of specific details about county spending, and Yee Yick had to contact Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer’s office to confirm the program still existed.

“That’s been one of our big frustrations,” said Yee Yick, who works for the Center on Policy Initiatives, a think tank that has long pushed for the county budget to become more transparent and better shaped by community input. “Plain and simple, it’s not accessible. It’s not transparent. It’s really difficult to know what the county’s spending money on.”