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