Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Demystifying Your Municipal Budget

Welcome to Civic Parent’s newest series: Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Demystifying Your Municipal Budget. This is a plain-language walk through New Jersey’s Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB) , a document every town must publish,  in Fall 2025 as a mayoral race unfolds in Jersey City (where I live).

I’ve returned to the UFB many times over the past decade. I first wrote about it when New Jersey began requiring cities to publish it (“Tax Abatements 601: Brighter Sunshine Mandated for NJ Abatements”), highlighting how transparency could shed light on tax abatements. Later, I unpacked it again during the first summer of COVID, co-taught a Zoom session with Montclair advocates, and used it in my public budgeting course at Saint Peter’s University to help MPA students connect numbers to people and policy.

Now, I want to bring this budget back to my front page again for residents, newcomers, and even elected officials who may not have had the chance to explore the city budget in depth. The goal is simple: to help all of us read our city’s finances with clarity, confidence, and curiosity.

Each post will explore one section of the UFB and answer a core civic question: Where does the money come from, where does it go, and what does it tell us about our city’s priorities? 

Some topics I’ll aim to cover in this brief series include:

• Setting the Table: What You Need to Feel Included.  A starting explainer if you’re new to New Jersey or are brand new to local budgets.
• You Belong Here: How Your Tax Bill Connects to the City Budget – Using UFB Page 1 to see the three local governments—city, county, and schools—and how each as its own “levy” and tax rate.
• Following the Money: Where the City Gets Its Income – Using UFB, Page 2 to see city revenues.
• Spending the Money: Where the City’s Dollars Go – Using UFB, Page 3 to see city expense
• The Challenge to Balance: Spotting Gaps in the City Budget – Using UFB, Page 4 to see potential imbalances between revenue and expense in your local city budget.
• The Ground Beneath It All: Understanding the City’s Tax Base – Using UFB, Page 5 to understand the real estate landscape.
• Incentives and Discounts: A Closer Look at Abatements and PILOT Revenues– Using page 6 to see more clearly the abatements and PILOT revenue on the city’s books
• The People Behind the Numbers: Payroll, Benefits, and Time Earned – Using UFB, Pages 7–9 to understand “people cost” — payroll, healthcare, and accumulated absences
• Community IOUs: Understanding City Debt and Long-Term Promises – Using UFB, Page 10 to see details about municipal debt.
• Working Together: Insight into Share Services Across Municipal Borders – Using UFB, Page 11 to learn about shared services

What You’ll Take Away

By the end of this series, my hope is that you will:

• Feel more empowered to find and dig into your municipality’s UFB
• Feel more equipped to ask data-based questions of local elected and administrators
• Feel more confident and less intimidated around local finance, budgets, and property taxes
• Feel encouraged to share and teach others what you’ve learned — so that you can help pay it forward

Fiscal literacy grows in community. When you explain what you’ve learned to a friend or neighbor, you internalize it more deeply. And you create a relational (not zero sum) cycle of learning.

The best way to learn civics is to share civics.