This post is part of a Civic Parent’s series, Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Decoding Your City Budget. This series is a plain-language walk through New Jersey’s Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB).
Page 2 of the User Friendly Budget shows the revenue side of the budget — where the city’s money comes from. Every municipality must fill out this template. Nine income categories are presented in addition to five itemized areas of property tax.
This post is intentionally basic. My goal is to help you find and access the data, not to analyze it in depth — yet. There’s much more to explore, including how different communities structure and rely on certain revenue sources (for example, Jersey City’s heavy use of PILOT fees). I’ll return to those deeper questions in a later post.
Key Takeaways:
- Property tax remains the dominant revenue source, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. There are nine types of income in all, plus property tax.
- Municipalities use these different buckets of income differently — gaining fuller transparency may depend on you digging deeper
- Actively engaging with the numbers unlocks real understanding. Typing them into a spreadsheet, charting the trends, questioning what you see — these practices move you from reading data to learning data.
In this post we’ll take a quick look at UFB, Page 2 and briefly compare/contrast two very different municipalities: Jersey City, NJ (approximate population in 2020: 290,000) and Florham Park, NJ (approximate population in 2020: 13,000).
Florham Park’s 2025 UFB, Page 2
Jersey City’s 2025 UFB, Page 2
Let’s unlock the data
In an earlier post in this series (“Welcome, Settle In. Let’s Go Over How to Find and Open Your City’s Budget“), I noted the importance of laying out the math at home. I want to model what I mean by that below. I’ve created a simple google spreadsheet with the numbers from the PDF budget (above) in a simple columnar format with basic percentage of totals and an accompanying pie graph (shown below). These public budgets can appear intimidating and they are very busy with lots of technical detail; but if you extract the key data, you can learn and grow more confident in that learning.
Example #1 – Florham Park (Morris County)
In Florham Park’s 2024 budget, the largest funding sources on UFB Page 2 – as shown in the “Total Anticipated Revenue” column – were:
- $16.6 million – Property Tax
- $7.8 million – Local Revenue, which include utilities
- $2.4 million – Other Special Items
These budgets have notable similarities:
First, both municipalities rely primarily on property tax as the largest income driver. This is income derived from the tax base. And second, both rely on a different mix of revenues in addition to property tax to fund themselves
The budgets also have some notable differences:
Local Revenues.
First, Florham Park’s utilities (e.g., water, pool, and sewer) are included under “Local Revenues.”
- Florham Park’s Utilities are included in the UFB Page 2
In contrast, Jersey City’s water-related revenues do not appear here. That is because they’re reported separately in the Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority (JC MUA) budget here. And here’s some nuance: a taxpayer would have to know to go looking for the JC MUA file (not an obvious task). This reveals an important point: understanding Jersey City’s full cost structure is more complex (and a slightly higher burden, in terms of digging for the data) as opposed to Florham Park, especially if you want to include water and other utility costs in the full picture. Of note, New Jersey law allows municipalities to create separate MUAs — neither good nor bad — but it means the UFB alone may not capture every local cost. It’s an important caveat to keep in mind.
Other Special Items.
A second key difference is “Other Special Items.”
Jersey City’s budget shows a much larger share in this category — about 24% — compared to Florham Park. Jersey City’s primary driver here is abatement (PILOT) revenue, which appears on UFB Page 6.
Florham Park’s Page 6 is blank, while Jersey City’s spans two full pages — a clear signal of how significant abatements are to Jersey City’s overall revenue mix.
Learning by doing
Engaging with the data will help you make sense of it. By keying in the numbers (or writing them on a piece of paper), you will force yourself to think more deeply about the data. To help you feel empowered not just to read this data, but to work with it, I’ve provided my Google Sheet as a resource. For instance, you can use it to enter your own city’s UFB Page 2 data using my file as a template. And, an important note: if you’re new to Google Sheets: you must make a copy of my file before editing (this is required, as you cannot edit my file which is a template). The green cells are for inputs, and the resulting percentage of totals (and chart) will update automatically.
Make It Stick – Do the Work at Home
One of my favorite books, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, helped shape how I think about learning and teaching. I first read it to better understand how to help my college students grasp basic accounting and finance concepts. The book emphasizes that real learning happens when we actively retrieve, apply, and work with ideas — not just consume them passively.
That principle applies here, too. By working directly with the numbers, you’ll start thinking more deeply about them — and that’s when the data will start to ‘stick.’
If you’re new to spreadsheets, take your time and try to have fun learning. There are tons of free resources online to learn about spreadsheets – it’s all free.
I’ll close with my three golden rules of learning civics, shaped by more than a decade of writing Civic Parent:
- Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The only real misstep is not taking one at all.
- You (likely) didn’t learn this stuff in school. It’s never too late to get engaged.
- Once you learn, teach someone else. The best way to learn civics is to share civics.
Comments are open for questions or feedback.
Resources:
- Florham Park, NJ. n.d. “Florham Park’s 2025 User Friendly Budget.” Florham Park. https://www.florhamparknj.gov/media/Finance/Budgets/2025/2025%20Adopted%20User%20Friendly%20Budget.pdf.
- Jersey City MUA. n.d. “Jersey City MUA 2024 Budget.” Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority. https://jcmua.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-adopted-budget.pdf.
- Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority – Operating Both the Sewerage and Water Systems of Jersey City, NJ. n.d. Accessed October 18, 2025. https://jcmua.com/.
- Jersey City, NJ. n.d. “Jersey City’s 2025 User Friendly Budget.” Jersey City. https://cdnsm5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_6189660/File/City%20Hall/Finance/Budgets/0906_fba_2025.pdf.
- Make It Stick. n.d. “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.” Accessed October 18, 2025. https://www.makeitstick.com.
