Understanding City Budgets

Question

What are the most fruitful ways to dissect a city budget for the non-accountant? Are there any standards for releasing budget data that I should be advocating?

In my particular case(Fort Lauderdale, FL), I am working with unofficial documents provided by the city upon request. I am interested in putting together some kind of visualization, but I am having difficulty understanding the basics of the budget.

I did notice that there seems to be a reporting of local budgets(at least part of them) to the state (i.e. Transparency Florida's Local Budgets page), hopefully using a standard format.

Answer 1

open budget and open spending are what you are looking for:
https://github.com/adstiles/openbudgetoakland
https://openspending.org/

openspending csv format is basic, but still quite confusing, at least for me:
you only need three columns: date, amount, unique id. from what i can tell, there is no way to automate this, and you're going to have to literally get all up in the guts of budget documents, and rip out what you need. i created a google doc you can see/copy here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aq0hZevysGfkdDNUVjVwazJ0M0NSZm9MdVBpTkhJdEE&usp=drive_web#gid=0

there's more to openspending than three columns, plus my explanation is quite vague, so loading data into openspending in-depth guide here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YBXX6du4rOV6OutZncT7gyJeOA7zHml3cC1TtWJW65w/edit

openspending is where you want to submit actual spending, so final budgets, and openbudget is where you want to release budget submissions, proposals, etc.

Answer 2

From having been an elected municipal official (although for a really small municipality), I found that you generally had to look at how a given line item changed from year to year. (eg, this line was up 30% from last year).

Of course, this means that when they start re-classifying expenses, or moving them around between departments, it's more difficult to see.

I also found it useful to look at not just the previous year's budget, but its status each month -- some items would be a lump payment at the beginning or end of the year (eg, membership dues), while others would be a steady rate through the year (eg, salary). Some would vary, but have a known curve to it (eg, electrical bills). This was important so that we'd know if we had used 60% of a given line when we were only 6 months in, if that was going to be a problem or not. If an item was only at 40%, did that mean we could move funds from there to somewhere else?