Evaluate city budget?

October 8, 2023 9:34 PM

Do you have any resources to evaluate a city budget? I am mainly thinking of comparative city budgets, or benchmarking or guidelines, and especially interested in larger cities in the USA. Such as maybe "X of 100 largest U.S. cities spend at least Y percent of their budget on Z." Etc. I am open to suggestions. I am also interested in related matters, such as municipal bonds.
posted by NotLost to Law & Government (7 answers total)

Response by poster: Also interested in any innovations, such as increasing public participation in the budgeting process.
posted by NotLost at 9:35 PM on October 8, 2023

Philadelphia has a surprisingly readable annual budget summary (pdf link), and in 2022 the city controller (basically the auditor) put out a good page on the proposed budget changes.
posted by sepviva at 10:32 PM on October 8, 2023

If you're looking for a book, we used Steven Finkler's Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-For-Profit Organizations in my public administration finance class.
posted by sepviva at 10:37 PM on October 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

This sounds like a great idea. My guess is that it would be tough to compile this data for camparison, because large city budgets often have dumb complications, sometimes meant to obscure how much they spend and on what, and those complications would take local knowhow to unscramble into usable data.

There is the documenters network (disclaimer, I am a documenter for City Bureau in Chicago), that aims to gather info from governmental public meetings. There are folks documenting in a bunch of cities, but it is still a small sample and wouldn't include the top x number of anything.
posted by kaelynski at 8:53 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you're using this as a way to evaluate communities' stability and ability to support a healthy community, consider maybe also looking at how well the city council functions together. If those folks are constantly infighting, that's likely both an effect of and a cause of further problems.
posted by amtho at 9:52 AM on October 9, 2023

You might find some cross-city research published in public administration journals. I think I came across some activist analyses that looked at the percentage of city budgets that go to policing, I'll see if I can find those. Otherwise, in terms of city budget research, the most common is the local reporter or activist journalist looking at a single city.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:08 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Examples of what you might be able to find in the public admin scholarship.

Pushing the City Limits: Policy Responsiveness in Municipal Government
Are city governments capable of responding to the preferences of their constituents? Is the menu of policy options determined by forces beyond their direct control? We answer these questions using a comprehensive cross-sectional database linking voter preferences to local policy outcomes in more than 2,000 midsize cities and a new panel covering cities in two states.

The impact of pork-barrel capital funding in schools: Evidence from participatory budgeting in NYC
Pork-barrel spending is a form of public spending controlled by individual legislators and primarily serving a local interest. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a type of pork, council member capital discretionary education spending voted upon in a participatory budgeting (PB) process, on school budgets and performance in New York City.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:13 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]