I'm trying something new on Civic Parent - video tutorials with accompanying interactive Tableau visualizations. I've been told my in-person and on-screen explanations are helpful - I do this with clients, in my volunteer work, and I've done it in public spaces with organizations like Jersey City Together. So what I'm trying to do here...Continue reading
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). In my previous post I looked at the idea of structural imbalance. In this post I want to dig...Continue reading
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). In my last post, I wrote “Where the Money Goes: Local Government is Mostly People Cost” which pointed to structural...Continue reading
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...Continue reading
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...Continue reading
This post is part of a Civic Parent’s series, Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Demystifying Your Municipal Budget. This series is a plain-language walk through New Jersey’s Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB). Page 1 of the User Friendly Budget aims to put the Municipality in context of your entire tax bill....Continue reading
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). I started sketching this series in late August, somewhere between the Route 440 Staples and the Dollar Store on...Continue reading
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...Continue reading
This is a follow-up to a previous post about the 2025/26 schools budget about Jersey City’s 2025/26 schools budget which was introduced on March 19th. Key Insights Include 21% School Levy Increase Here are key insights which I expand upon below: I’ve shared a few insights about each of these items below. I also have...Continue reading
The Board of Education's budget was confusing to the public despite several notable updates to the funding paradigm. My friend Amy Wilson writes at “Neighborhood Character” and she recently asked me for my insights about the 2025 schools budget in Jersey City. Intrigued, I dug into the documents for the first time in early April....Continue reading
I recently met with high school student leaders in Jersey City Public Schools who are sharing stories of the conditions inside their schools. They go by the name “Revolutionizers of Jersey City High Schools” (r.o.j.c.h.s.) and have an Instagram channel here. Their pictures and videos give a glimpse of what they are experiencing on a...Continue reading
I was curious about Jersey City’s budgetary trends and so created a few high level visuals that I am sharing on CivicParent in case others were interested in understanding these documents in real-time, i.e. relevant to the current budget process in 2023. I wrote a series about the “user friendly” budget in 2020 if you...Continue reading
This is part of a 2023 series about property tax in NJ. View the series landing page here. An upfront caveat: the levy is a topic with vast scope beyond what I can and want to cover here. There is a lot more you can reference; for instance, a good read if you have the...Continue reading
To follow the public money and better understand what’s driving your property tax bills, you have to know when to engage the process. Understanding the “when” can take a taxpayer into a series of bureaucratic rabbit holes (I’ve heard this feedback from others and I’ve also experienced it myself), so I want to disclaim upfront:...Continue reading
This is part of a series about the 2022 Jersey City budget. To see the full series, click here. For a listing of public data used in this post, please see the bottom of the post. Many thanks to those in community who gave feedback about this topic/post and helped improve it from concept to...Continue reading
Update, Fall 2025: I’ve got a new series revisiting the User Friendly Budget. Take your seat at the table and learn more here. This is an update to my “User Friendly Budget” series with a focus on Montclair. Your town’s user friendly budget must be posted on your town’s website (per state law here). The...Continue reading
Update, Fall 2025: I’ve got a new series revisiting the User Friendly Budget. Take your seat at the table and learn more here. This is an update to my “User Friendly Budget” series with a focus on Montclair. Your town’s user friendly budget must be posted on your town’s website (per state law here). The first page of...Continue reading
This is a quick update to my 2021 municipal budget series which I wrote this summer based on the budget introduced in June 2021. On August 31st 2021, the city council approved the budget in its final form with some changes. I wanted to briefly summarize those changes and also close the series with some...
In 2021 Jersey City Public Schools fully funded its schools for the first time in over a decade. Reasonable questions now follow related to transparency and accountability, including: How do we hold the district administration and school board accountable for full investment in our kids? I’m part of a team with Jersey City Together and...Continue reading
This is part of a series on the 2021 city budget. The spirit of this series is: I’m interested in unpacking the budget and sharing as I go. In that same spirit, I’m sharing interactive Tableau data visualizations that help others dig into the budget. See the full series here. The 2021 budget documents are online here. Some...Continue reading
The Board of Education (BOE) nearly shut down “remote” public comment last week and it’s worth explaining what happened, simply to highlight how important it is for the district and board to improve transparency and communication – both internally but also with the public. “Remote” public comment is calling into a public meeting and sharing...Continue reading
Update, Fall 2025: I’ve got a new series revisiting the User Friendly Budget. Take your seat at the table and learn more here. Note: the visualizations below are best viewed on a computer or tablet (vs a phone). Jersey City recently announced it was terminating an abatement on four buildings within the Beacon complex. The...Continue reading
I am part of the education team with Jersey City Together and in May 2020 we created a school tax expense calculator to help Jersey City residents understand the personal investment for a $50 million increase to the school levy. Our aim was to the put the power of understand property taxes into taxpayers’ hands. ...
Every municipality must pay for services that are then consumed by its residents. These services include: Police force (eg the JCPD) Fire department Road maintenance for city roads (a note on roads...in Jersey City, Ocean Avenue, Eerie Street, and Manhattan Avenue are city roads, thus they are maintained with city funds...however JFK Boulevard is a...Continue reading
Every municipality is funded by a mix of income streams, including: Property taxes (everyone pays property tax...you either pay it directly if you're a property owner, or you pay it to your landlord. Your rent includes the cost of property tax) State Aid Local Revenues - these are user-fee income streams like marriage licenses, pet...Continue reading
In his 2010 report, “A Programmatic Examination of Tax Abatements,” NJ Comptroller A. Matthew Boxer highlighted numerous weaknesses with abatements. One issue he touched upon was transparency. He stated, “Information concerning abatement[s]…is not published in a transparent manner or centralized location, making it difficult to impossible for the public to compare, calculate the effect of,...Continue reading