7 ms·
Philadelphia budget data visualization
- jevyjevjevs 14y agoNice visualization but HOLY CRAP is that normal for the police department suck up so much of a city's budget?
- bengarvey 14y agoNot even the worst of it. All the firefighter and police pension expenses are in the Finance Department.
- wgoodwin 14y agoI was going to say that 20% seems exceptionally low, but I see how the pensions were being backed out. Fire and public safety, and their corresponding pensions, make up the bulk (like often >50%) of all municipal expenditures.
- leviathant 14y agoI live about a mile north of City Hall, but I grew up in a small town (pop 3000) in south-central PA. I've been living in Philadelphia for only a few years now, but every single night, I hear sirens, several times a night. And several times a week, I hear helicopters. I'm used to it now, but the police activity is on a level I never could have imagined existed in America when I was living in my tiny little town. Parts of the city near Temple are lit up and patrolled like it's the green zone in Baghdad. When you stop and think about it, there is a near-constant state of emergency, and this no doubt applies to any major American metropolitan area. I'm not at all surprised that the police department has such a huge budget here.
- pc86 14y ago20-25% is about average for non-pension expenditures on police. It's easy to lose context of just how massive a part of PA Philadelphia is. The city proper alone has more than 10% of the state's population (1.5MM to PA's ~12.7). Add in the other PA counties and you're close to 4. Add in the out-of-state parts of the Metropolitan area and you're quickly closing in on 6. I've always felt safe when I've been there but given the sheer volume of people, I'd surprised they're not spending a larger amount of police forces.
- mjn 14y agoPercentage-wise it looks pretty normal. $650 million out of $3.5 billion is a bit under 20%, which is common. I used to live in Santa Cruz, a much smaller town with a much smaller police department, but about the same percentage of city funding: police took $22 million out of $101 million (http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=21940 http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?doc..., pp. 22-23).
- ry0ohki 14y agoTry running for office in a city with a platform of "cutting the police budget" and see how far you get...
- Shivetya 14y agoYou could end up with the police union buying the house next door to you, staging protests there and posting signs about how dangerous your making the city. You could even end up finding yourself or relatives followed for their protection as well. It is not the public someone who wants to run on that platform has to fear
- numbsafari 14y agoIn a city with "1 murder, 2 rapes, 25 robberies, 25 assaults, 35 burglaries, 110 thefts, and 20 stolen cars" PER DAY -- the public is exactly who you'd better be afraid of.
- rayiner 14y agoSee: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Philadelphia-Pennsylvania.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Philadelphia-Pennsylvan... Every day Philadelphia has about: 1 murder, 2 rapes, 25 robberies, 25 assaults, 35 burglaries, 110 thefts, and 20 stolen cars. The active police + prison budget seems to be about $850 million. That's about $570 per person to keep 1.5 million people safe in one of the poorest major cities in the country.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ludflu 14y agoas a Philadelphian, this is great.
- bengarvey 14y agoThanks.
- ludflu 14y agoalso, interesting he doesn't have anything to say about the incumbent. http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-controller-butkovitz.asp http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-cont... Is there a term limit or something? They're both dems.
- bengarvey 14y agoPhiladelphia is a one party town. The real race is the primary.
- smoorman1024 14y agoYou are running for comptroller of Philadelphia? Best of luck to you. It seems like you have the smarts to get noticed for your merit.
- bengarvey 14y agoBrett and I worked together on the project.
- umjames 14y agoGreat job! Can you speak (or maybe a blog post would be better) about how you put this together? What did you have to do get/massage the data? What tech did you use, etc? It's nice to see stuff like this coming out of Philly.
- bengarvey 14y agoThe site uses D3.js http://d3js.org http://d3js.org. I'll write up a full recap later.
- gphil 14y agoWhere does education fit into this?
- bengarvey 14y agoEntirely different budget. This is the General Fund which doesn't include the school data.
- _delirium 14y agoTo add to that, the Philadelphia School District is completely separate from the municipal government: its funds come from separate taxes, and (since 2001) it reports directly to the Governor, not the city government.
- 011100000110010 14y agoThis is just fascinating, nice work!
- Bill_Dimm 14y agoNeat. Was some tool used to construct this, or was it done manually? What may not be obvious to people initially when they look at it, is that when you see the label "Department of Finance" on the gray rectangle that is actually the label for the gray rectangle plus the green and orange ones adjacent to it -- the different colors represent the expenditure classes described on the "About" page. It would perhaps be clearer if there were thick black lines separating the items (instead of just a thick line of the background color) and zero separation between the colored rectangles representing the breakdown by class within an item (which currently have thin lines of the background color separating them giving the impression that they are separate items).
- bengarvey 14y agoThe treemap was made using D3 with some customizations. All the source and datasets are on github. The department groupings are done with spacing. They are subtle, I know. Right at this moment, I am adding color coding to the About modal.
- pc86 14y agoMind sharing the github link?
- newsoundwave 14y agohttps://github.com/bengarvey/budget https://github.com/bengarvey/budget
- bengarvey 14y agohttp://github.com/bengarvey/budget http://github.com/bengarvey/budget
- smcl 14y agoThis is a nice visualisation but it's not clear to me what the purpose of it is - other than the immediate "WOW look how much is spent on Police + Prisons!" that struck me. Or is it simply a "check it out, I know what comprises Philadelphia's budget...". I'm a total outsider so I admit it's entirely likely that this means something to folks living there. But either way it would be nice if there was a little blurb on what he's trying to say or some attempt to explain what the budget would look like if he was elected. As it is this is simply "Look at this budget, just look at it".
- bengarvey 14y agoThat's info can be found on the main site http://brettmandel.com http://brettmandel.com
- amalcon 14y agoIt also seemed odd to me that so much was under "Finance Department". I'd figured Finance would cover the actual bookkeepers, interest on bonds, and other things related to money in the abstract. From its size that budget must also be "Stuff that doesn't go anywhere else".
- tg3 14y agoIn most cities this also covers revenues, aka tax collection. It would be nice to see the breakdown on how much of the budget is dedicated to collecting taxes to fund the budget.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoWhen you drill down you get to the actual entries in the budget that correspond to the particular thing you are looking at. It was interesting all the Director of Finance salaries of 900K - 1.4M. Seems like a lot of money to pay a civil servant but I may have been misreading the budget item. I was looking at things like this: 192 FICA TAXES 0192 DIRECTOR OF FINANCE - - - 2012 - $1,369,489.56 PPE 07/10/2011 FICA MATCH CITY OF PHILADELPHIA Seems to suggest that this director made $1,369,489.56 in compensation.
- rhizome 14y agoNeat. I'd add a legend for the colors and some kind of detail for the lower-right corner tiny stuff that kind of seems like it might as well not be there.
- southphillyman 14y agoCool, shall share!
- pudo 14y agoIf you want to make some budget visualizations of your own, let me link this site we've been working on: http://openspending.org/help/index.html http://openspending.org/help/index.html It's powering a variety of budget sites, like http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/, http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/ http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/ and http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/ http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/. People can just go an upload their own data quickly - OpenStreetMap for money :)
- jarvuschris 14y agoPhiladelphia needed someone to put this together... it's amazing that with open data, a campaign can help create something of real and lasting value in the course of their pitch. gov 2.0 <3
- darkarmani 14y ago> $1,062,921.12 PANASONIC TB19/2GB/TOUGHB The prisons department needs a lot of toughbooks. How many toughbooks do you get for a million dollars?
- tedunangst 14y ago265 @$4000. Base price is ~3400, but figure it comes with warranty and service addons and whatnot.
- chebucto 14y agoYou can see the salaries of individuals, at least within the police dept. Is this normal for US cities? I've seen situations where public servants earning more than a certain threshold (eg 100kpa) had their names & salaries published. Doing so for everyone down to crossing guards seems like an unnecessary breach of privacy.
- rayiner 14y agoIt's quite common. Chicago just overhauled their website and lists the salary of every single public employee: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Administration-Finance/Current-Employee-Names-Salaries-and-Position-Title/xzkq-xp2w https://data.cityofchicago.org/Administration-Finance/Curren...
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThat is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Really helps you drill down to where the money is going in the budget.
- joez 14y agoHere are two similar ones: Obama's Budget Proposal (from 2010): http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/ http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/
- momop 14y agoThose decimals are distracting and dont seem to have any purpose at this scale. Also it may be easier if you just put the $s in millions.
- 2468ben 14y agoAlmost $4,000,000 a year on "sidewalk falls". Does anyone know what % on average an injury lawyer makes from those settlements?
- cookingrobot 14y agoThe detailed listings should be sorted by expenditure to better explain what's in each category.