
Philadelphia budget data visualization - bengarvey
http://budget.brettmandel.com
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smcl
This 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".

~~~
amalcon
It 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
In 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
When 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.

~~~
SilasX
Nothing compared to the $15 million it shows as total compensation for the
sheriff. (Don't know how to link it; just go to the farthest-right gray square
that touches the bottom of the overall rectangle.)

~~~
DigitalJack
That's to the Sherriff's department. It's all the salaries of deputies and
whatnot. If you click on a box after zoomed in it gives an itemization.

Looks like the Sherriff (Barbara Deeley) had two line items for salary and
made about 130k or so.

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jevyjevjevs
Nice visualization but HOLY CRAP is that normal for the police department suck
up so much of a city's budget?

~~~
leviathant
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.

~~~
pc86
20-25% 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.

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smoorman1024
You 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
Brett and I worked together on the project.

~~~
umjames
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.

~~~
bengarvey
The site uses D3.js <http://d3js.org>. I'll write up a full recap later.

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joez
Here are two similar ones:

Obama's Budget Proposal (from 2010):
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html>

<http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/>

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Bill_Dimm
Neat. 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
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.

~~~
pc86
Mind sharing the github link?

~~~
newsoundwave
<https://github.com/bengarvey/budget>

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pudo
If 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>

It's powering a variety of budget sites, like
<http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/>, <http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/> and
<http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/>. People can just go an upload their own
data quickly - OpenStreetMap for money :)

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jarvuschris
Philadelphia 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

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darkarmani
> $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
265 @$4000. Base price is ~3400, but figure it comes with warranty and service
addons and whatnot.

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2468ben
Almost $4,000,000 a year on "sidewalk falls". Does anyone know what % on
average an injury lawyer makes from those settlements?

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chebucto
You 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
It's quite common. Chicago just overhauled their website and lists the salary
of every single public employee:
[https://data.cityofchicago.org/Administration-
Finance/Curren...](https://data.cityofchicago.org/Administration-
Finance/Current-Employee-Names-Salaries-and-Position-Title/xzkq-xp2w)

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ludflu
as a Philadelphian, this is great.

~~~
bengarvey
Thanks.

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rhizome
Neat. 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.

~~~
bengarvey
Working on that right now! Should be up shortly.

~~~
bengarvey
Done.

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momop
Those 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.

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ChuckMcM
That is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Really helps you drill down to
where the money is going in the budget.

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ludflu
also, interesting he doesn't have anything to say about the incumbent.
[http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-
cont...](http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-controller-
butkovitz.asp)

Is there a term limit or something? They're both dems.

~~~
bengarvey
Philadelphia is a one party town. The real race is the primary.

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011100000110010
This is just fascinating, nice work!

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cookingrobot
The detailed listings should be sorted by expenditure to better explain what's
in each category.

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gphil
Where does education fit into this?

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bengarvey
Entirely different budget. This is the General Fund which doesn't include the
school data.

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_delirium
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.

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southphillyman
Cool, shall share!

