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
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
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 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
On June 15th, Jersey City released introduced its 2022 budget. This is a part of a series about that budget. In this post I’m using three public datasets: A: Jersey City’s 2022 Municipal Budget (Introduced) with proposed 2022 revenue and expense, located on the city website here. B: Jersey City’s 2015-2021 Municipal Budget summaries compiled...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
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 a post in a series about NJ's User Friendly Budget. My intent is to share basic analysis and insights with community as a way to encourage taxpayers to engage with this...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