This is a post in a series about NJ's User Friendly Budget. My intent is to share basic analysis and insights with community as a way to encourage taxpayers to engage with this document and learn more about local public finance. Read the other posts in this series here including how to access your town's UFB and the UFB's table of contents.
In this post, we'll use the User Friendly Budget to gain insight into the basic question of: "What does my town or city spend money on?" and "What is the biggest driver of expense in my town?" The "UFB-3" tab in your town's User Friendly Budget can help you understand these questions, and create basic visuals like this one:
By the way - a note on the chart above. You can interact with the chart - explore the counties and municipalities using the drop-down box filters. You can also re-sort the X-axis (to show bars in descending order of dollars) -- check out the quick tutorial below on how to do that:
Ok - let's dig in and learn a bit about the chart above; where the data comes from, what those categories mean, and how we can source all of this back to our own town's budget to better understand our local financial paradigm.
I want to begin with a recap on why this budget is so useful, and worth the investment to dig into and explore; this is important context for the actual data.
What's So Special About this Budget?
One benefit of the User Friendly Budget is that the data is aggregated in unique ways that help us see the structural nature of how the municipality both collects and spends money.
A city budget should always merit maximum scrutiny and detail, but taxpayers often are not invited into the process in meaningful ways that seek maximum input.
What we are seeing now, in the midst of both a pandemic and a public debate about public safety dollars, is taxpayers forcing themselves into the conversation about the city budget. In my view, this is a healthy, vigorous exercise of civic sector muscle.
Should your city's budget change? Should it stay the same? That's a community question and as such, community should help answer it.
Influencing the Shape of a Public Budget
Influencing the shape of a budget requires many factors - but one I'll highlight here is that we must understand the budget's structure.
Any structure - be it a wood-frame house or a city budget - requires components to hold the structure up -- and some of those components are more easily moved than others. For instance, a support beam in the middle of a house is not easy to move, but planks acting as a guardrail on the back deck perhaps are. Each of these components is ultimately moveable -- but one component (the support beam) will require a larger scope of teamwork and effort and a longer timeline to, in the end, move than, say, a guardrail on the back deck. In a budget, some areas of revenue and expense are like the support beams - harder to change - and other areas of revenue of expense are like the guardrails on the back deck - easier to change.
Gleaning Insight into the Structure of Our Municipal Budgets
The third tab of the User Friendly Budget - "UFB3 - Appropriations Summary" - helps us see and understand the structure of our city's budget from the expense side of the budget. I'm starting with expenses because they directly inform us about the services that we, the taxpayers, pay for. So it's a logical entry point into this series.
A few upfront caveats about the "UFB-3 Appropriations Summary" tab:
- This is a *summary* view...and other tabs in the UFB file provide related nuance and detail (which is one reason why this is a series -- I want to dive into both the summary and the related detail).
- Since the User Friendly Budget is a standardized document used by every town and city in NJ, we can compare and contrast a town's expense structure with the expense structure of other towns and cities throughout the state (that's what post "4b" in this series will look at).
- And I would be remiss not to point out that context abounds. A larger city like Jersey City (where I live) will have a larger budget in terms of overall dollars, with perhaps a different allocation of dollars to different buckets of expense, than a smaller suburb like Florham Park (where I grew up). I encourage you to dig into data for towns you're familiar with as a way to connect the budget data - which can seem abstract - with your own concrete experiences and observations.
Tracing the Source File to the Visualization
A major goal of this series is to help ease the process for taxpayers interacting with the raw data contained in source documents. But, we must understand the raw data as a starting point. Shown below is a callout of a User Friendly Budget, Tab "UFB3 - Appropriations Summary" from Morristown, NJ. I've boxed in red, blue, and green the columns of data I'm using in the visualizations below the picture.
The example shown is Morristown, in Morris County:
And here is the same data, in an interactive format, via Tableau - check out YOUR town!
(note: the data in the RED and GREEN boxes from above ar included in the visualization below):
Desktop View.
This is the same visualization as further up in this post. You can view it above or click on the image to go to the desktop / tablet visualization and interact with the data:
