At What Cost?
Announcing a new way to understand local budgets across the country
Did you know that local governments (cities, counties, school districts) spent over $2.2 trillion in 2021?1 That’s nearly as much as all state governments combined and about ⅓ of total federal spending including Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. In other words, thousands of local government decisions across the country account for a large part of the public investment that shapes our lives.
This is a topic we’ve been tackling from a number of directions here at Civilytics – sharing information on how to read local budgets, analyzing and summarizing budget decisions for grassroots organizations, and now, making cross-community comparisons about budget priorities.
In this issue you’ll hear more about our latest work, a collaboration with PolicyLink to make cross-community budget comparisons more readily available. You’ll also hear how some of our community-specific work has been used on the ground in Des Moines, Iowa. And, because it has been unavoidably a “server-room summer”, we have a callback to a previous post about our IT infrastructure at Civilytics. We’re also swapping a music recommendation for a YouTube recommendation and wrapping up with our usual link roundup.
At What Cost? A look at local spending across 20 communities
Just Voices Iowa and an equitable budget
Inside baseball – a look at IT in our microbusiness
Show recommendation
Link roundup
On to the topics!
At What Cost? A look at local spending across 20 communities
Civiliytics is excited to announce the release of At What Cost? Examining Police, Sheriff, and Jail Budgets Across the US — a new data tool we developed in partnership with the National Equity Atlas (a research partnership between PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute). The interactive dashboard explores how much cities and counties across the United States spend on policing and incarceration.
What Does the Dashboard Show?
Using data from the fiscal year 2022 budget allocations of 20 US cities and counties, At What Cost? compares local spending on carceral activities with money allocated toward community investments that contribute to residents’ well-being — like housing, health care, and social services.
Together, these 20 cities and counties:
Plan to spend $142.35 billion in annual expenditures, with at least $38 billion of that coming from tax dollars paid by residents
Allocate $22 billion in annual spending to police, jails, and carceral activities.
Employ over 133,000 people as workers in carceral systems each year
Represent over 39.7 million people, or 1 out of every 8 people in the US
The “local” and “detail” tabs of the dashboard provide more information on what carceral activities each selected city or county funds and how.
Why Does the Dashboard Focus on Local Budgets?
City and county budgets have immense consequences on communities and the people who comprise them. However, these budgets often are hundreds of pages long and not easy to understand. That’s why it’s important to have a tool, like At What Cost?, that can support residents in better understanding how their tax dollars are being spent.
The localities featured in the dashboard range in size, from just under 150,000 residents to more than 5 million. Not surprisingly, these local governments organize their provision of services — and corresponding budget information — in many different ways. To compare different communities as consistently as possible, the dashboard focuses on spending on specific activities rather than on specific department- or program-level spending. In addition, because residents in most communities pay taxes to and receive services from both the city and county, the dashboard features budget data from both types of local governments to document different communities’ spending priorities.
What Can I do with the Dashboard?
At What Cost? is a valuable tool for anyone working to promote transparency and accountability in local government. It enables users, including residents, advocates, and policymakers, to:
Understand how their tax dollars are being spent.
Assess their community’s spending priorities and compare them to other cities and counties.
Identify budget trends, funding disparities, and potential areas for reform.
One feature Hannah and I worked hard on was making the connection between the dashboard and budget documents clear and direct. In many of the visualizations, users can click on a link to go directly to the corresponding page of the budget or to see a tooltip with the budget pages the numbers are drawn from. Any questions about a particular number of value can be answered by referring to the original source.
To learn more about using the dashboard and leveraging its data, explore the user guide.
What Was Civilytics’ Role?
We lead the creation of the data for the dashboard by reading and coding 36 budget documents into a standard, comparable data file. We created the coding scheme and used it to turn hundreds of pages of budget documents into a tidy data file for visualization in Tableau. We then worked with the rest of the team to propose comparisons and metrics that best captured the meaningful differences across the communities in the data.
Just Voices Iowa and an equitable budget
Earlier this year we worked with a community organization called Just Voices Iowa working to raise awareness about and end the practice of racial profiling by police in Des Moines. As part of that work, they have heard repeatedly from community members about unmet needs and the impact of divestment from public services in their community. So we helped them to analyze the proposed city budget.
Like most cities (see dashboard above), a lot of spending in Des Moines is non-discretionary (i.e., federal/state grants, debt service, utility operation). The discretionary portion of the budget, the General Fund, is about ¼ of the total budget, or just over $202 million. Of that $202 million more than $1 out of every $3 goes to the Des Moines Police Department, leaving less than $130 million for everything else.
Des Moines’ discretionary budget is like that of a lot of cities we have looked at – police and fire spending are big line items, most spending is on staff (salaries and benefits), and many local social services (housing, education, food security) are funded by outside sources with limited city government funding.
This allocation is not new in Des Moines, you can see the history here (as well as the history of about 149 other cities). However, what is new is the shrinking of city spending on other services like parks, libraries, housing, and health. Just Voices has highlighted the cumulative impact of these decisions using the chart below which shows the 40 year investment in different service areas.
The Just Voices Iowa team is doing a great job talking to community members and engaging them in the budget process and we’ve been happy to work with them!
Callback: Inside baseball, a look at IT in our microbusiness
I recently had an unplanned excuse to test restoring our IT infrastructure from our offsite backup (read: near data disaster!) in July. Running a microbusiness means wearing a lot of hats and one that I enjoy, but have had to work on too lately is deploying hardware and applications to help us get our work done and keep our data safe.
It’s still largely the same today with a few tweaks, upgrades, and a lot more resiliency. If you’re interested in that side of things – give it a read!
Show Recommendation
I love the World Cup. The schedule was brutal for fans on the east coast, but I tried to diligently avoid spoilers and watch games on replay.2 And this summer’s World Cup was worth the effort. Late goals. Penalty shootouts. A computer “well-actuallying” a save into a goal that eliminated the United States.
But, above all the great action on the field, the “re-cap show” with Tobin Heath and Christen Press was the absolute star of the tournament for me. In addition to talking about the tournament, they had incredible guest segments covering things like tactics, the difficulties of making a career in the women’s professional game, and how sports science is woefully behind in supporting female athletes.
The conversations feel honest, emotional, educational, and inspiring all at once. Christen and Tobin complement each other so well and each episode is joyful. Even if you didn’t watch the World Cup - I highly recommend you check out this show (free, on YouTube!) and their organization.
Link Roundup
We hope we never have to think about it, but when you think about it, money bail is a cruel system
You are not innocent until proven guilty once you are placed under arrest. I’ll let the editorial speak for itself:
Here’s how it works. An officer arrests a person on suspicion of committing forgery. At the station, police consult the bail schedule and find the $20,000 rate that the suspect must pay in order to be released before trial. They direct the suspect to a list of phone numbers for bail bond agents who will lend the money for a fee, usually 10% of the bond, or in this case, $2,000. If the suspect can come up with the fee, he can go home and prepare his defense, but he will never get the $2,000 fee back. It’s effectively a punishment — not for being convicted, because there has been no conviction. It’s a penalty merely for being arrested.
If he doesn’t have the bail money, the suspect goes to jail. He will wait there for two to five days until he’s brought before a judge, is formally charged, perhaps gets a court-appointed lawyer and can finally argue that he’s safe to be released because of his ties to the community and his job. But he’s been in jail and missed work so he may well lose his job. He was away from his family. He has been confined to unsafe and miserable conditions, which is traumatizing. Until the hearing, even the prosecutor didn’t know of his case and couldn’t seek dismissal if it was a bad arrest. Once again, it’s a punishment for being accused and, in this case, for being poor.
The Times Editorial Board
Your regular update on LeBron James’ rebuild of Akron’s safety net
It is a well-established fact that this newsletter serves a secondary function as a LeBron James fan page. While LeBron and the Lakers ponder yet another rebuild after falling short in the NBA playoffs, LeBron’s ten-year long effort to rebuild an entire neighborhood is moving ahead at full steam. The project, centered now around the I Promise School, a public school within Akron Public Schools, has expanded to include housing, healthcare, job training, and more, not just serving the 600 students of the school, but their families and neighborhood as well.
This is the most important battle of James’ three-decade tenure in the public eye. There are children and parents, most of whom James will never meet, that will be affected by his dedication. There will be kids depending on James who haven’t even been born yet. This battle will continue long after his basketball career is over. In many ways, he’s committed his life to this cause because that’s exactly what it’s going to take if James, his foundation and the city of Akron are to see the change they’re convinced is possible.
Could the House of Representatives hold over 1,000 representatives? (Spoiler: yes!)
I’ve been loving this series from Danielle Allen in the Washington Post about how our democratic institutions could be modernized. She does an excellent job connecting democratic theory with practical realities and showing that our institutions can change, if we wish. This is a great visual article about how the Capitol could be physically reconfigured to allow for a much larger House of Representatives to meet, giving each of us better access to our representative in DC.
As always, thank you for reading and supporting our work!
Jared
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 Annual Surveys of State and Local Government Finances.
A skill I have honed from years of watching top-tier Korean esport events like the GSL.