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Jersey City 2014 Budget in 4 Easy Graphs

Recently joined OpenJC, a Code for America brigade, and for my first project I worked with Anna Lukasiak to create a set of graphs the 2014 Jersey City Municipal budget for a Budget Forum run by CivicJC.

We began with a scanned pdf which Anna converted into a set of Excel spreadsheets and loaded the data into interactive treemaps. I then made the following four basic charts as an introduction to the revenue and spending of the Jersey City Municipal Government.

The first graph compares the municipal budget to the JC agency budgets. Then a simple stacked bar chart to compare the major revenue sources vs the city spending. Final two charts provide more detail into the revenue and spending 

Data can be found on our project page.

 

The Board of Education budget is approximately 150 million dollars more than the city's municipal budget however most of the funding for the schools is from NJ state government. 


 

The top 3 sources of revenue for Jersey City (80%) are property taxes, abatements (properties with tax breaks offered to owners/developers) and state aid. While 71% of the spending goes to 5 major items: police, health insurance, debt payments, fire, and pensions.


 

The other revenues for the city, the bottom 20%, are from licenses, fees, permits, sale of land, taxes collect for library etc...


 

Finally, while the autonomous agencies have separate budgets, they will receive payments from the city which cover some of their costs. For example the Incinerator Authority gets $34 million while the Library get $8 million and the Parking Authority get around $1 million.


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