Where does education fit into this?
Philadelphia budget data visualization
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#12Where does education fit into this?
Entirely different budget. This is the General Fund which doesn't include the school data.
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#13This is just fascinating, nice work!
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#14Where does education fit into this?
Entirely different budget. This is the General Fund which doesn't include the school data.
To 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.
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#15Nice visualization but HOLY CRAP is that normal for the police department suck up so much of a city's budget?
I 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.
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#16Neat. 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).
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#17Nice visualization but HOLY CRAP is that normal for the police department suck up so much of a city's budget?
Percentage-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?doc..., pp. 22-23).
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#18You are running for comptroller of Philadelphia? Best of luck to you. It seems like you have the smarts to get noticed for your merit.
Brett and I worked together on the project.
Great 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.
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#19Neat. 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 cle…
The 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.
Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization
#20Nice visualization but HOLY CRAP is that normal for the police department suck up so much of a city's budget?
Not even the worst of it. All the firefighter and police pension expenses are in the Finance Department.
I 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.