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).
The third page in the UFB is where we see how government money is spent and it’s a busy, somewhat hard to read tab. To make it more accessible, I focused on the line-item names and the total appropriations, and then transferred the data into a simpler Google Sheet. 
Click image to enlarge in a new tab
Simplifying the view can help zero in on what we’re looking at
I digitized the appropriations into a Google sheet and then sorted from largest to smallest. There is a pie graph accompanying the data in case that’s helpful as well.
And with this simpler view we can focus on two key insights.
Insight #1: “People Cost” Drives the Budget
Municipal government is labor-intensive because government is service-driven. Two types of “people cost” dominate spending:
- Salaries – Grouped by department (e.g., Public Safety, Public Works, Administration)
- Benefits – which we see in mainly in Insurance (its own category) and Pension Contributions (within “Statutory Expenditures”)
These costs reflect the reality that services are delivered by people — police officers, firefighters, road crews, inspectors, administrators, and more.
Insight #2: These costs are structural
Structural costs function like the framing of a house — they give the budget its shape. And so people cost is the structural frame of a municipal budget; and important nuance to layer in here is that a lot of municipal people cost is governed by union contracts, which adds legal and financial structure to the budget over multiple years.
Community goes in 360 degrees
Taxpayers will (and should) have opinions about all of spending. I am not using this post – or any other posts in this series – to place value on any of this spending, hence it’s deliberately short and pointing to some key, high level insights.
My hope here is help more in community understand the structure of municipal budgets so that we can interpret the numbers with more clarity, as a community. If more people can understand, more people can participate. And more participation is healthy and needed.
A Note on Debt
Debt is another structural cost that shapes the overall budget. Most cities, like most families, borrow for many reasons. I’ll cover municipal debt more fully in a future post.
Where We’re Headed Next
My next post will focus on “structural imbalances,” which is a significant issue in Jersey City. I’ll walk through Page 4 in that next post in the series.
Looking Back for Context
You can revisit my earlier post on municipal expenditures from 2021. You’ll see that the structure of city spending hasn’t changed much in four years: Public Safety, Health Insurance, Debt Service, and Pension Costs remain the core categories.
If you live outside Jersey City, you’ll likely see a similar pattern in your own town’s budget. If you spot differences, I’d love to hear about them — comments are open.
