Shed light on city spending
Budget
making is a cross between extreme fighting and extreme burlesque.
Budgets are supposed to be transparent. Yet most budgets are opaque,
even illegible.
Hundreds
of pages are filled with mind numbing statistics,
circumspect promises, educated speculation and obfuscation. Don't
forget the pie charts, the bar charts, the spreadsheets and the
bullet points.
A
budget is an estimate. A budget doesn't tell us what is really
collected and what is really spent over the course of time.
City
finances ought to be more transparent. They aren't. They are cloaked
in jargon and prettified by princely images.
But
what we ought to know is never what we do know.
How
much does your city spend each month?
How
much revenue does your city collect each month?
The
making of city budgets is a fascinating exercise in democracy. But do
public hearings really provide citizens anything worthwhile?
Portsmouth's
leaders think so.
So
city officials were surprised when they heard that one public hearing
is scheduled on next year's budget, which begins July 1, 2016.
MayorKenny Wright and City Council member Bill Moody agreed that one
public hearing on next year's budget doesn't allow for much public
input. (That they agreed should be a story.)
Mayor
Wright said, though, “he hoped preemptive community forums about
the budget would eliminate the need for multiple public hearings.
But
the paucity of public hearings raises crucial and evocative issues.
Are
public hearings, where citizens get to rant and rave, of any
importance, except as therapy sessions for the aggrieved and
aggravated? Are public hearings really that crucial to the
compilation of a city budget?
Sometimes
it may be simpler to post proposed budget points on a website and
allow residents to comment online.
Nationwide,
cities disclose more spending and revenue data to their citizens than
do cities in this region.
“The
ability to see how government uses the public purse is fundamental to
democracy,” said a report by U.S. PIRG, a consumer interest group.
“Transparency in government spending checks corruption, bolsters
public confidence, improves responsiveness, and promotes greater
effectiveness and fiscal responsibility.”
The
report, Transparency in City Spending, rates the availability
of online government data in America's largest cities.
Here
are some examples.
- MY Money NYC and Checkbook NYC (residents can search for spending in 226 different categories)
- Portland, Oregon, posts revenue collected from property taxes
- Boston tracks city departments' performances
- Cincinnati's online checkbook shows expenditures by category