Philadelphia budget data visualization
budget.brettmandel.com
budget.brettmandel.com
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".
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.
Looks like the Sherriff (Barbara Deeley) had two line items for salary and made about 130k or so.
EDIT: No offense to Philly, but it's by a large margin the most dangerous city with more than 1 million people in the U.S. And that danger isn't as segregated as it is in say Chicago or New York, making policing harder.
Thankfully the Delaware river provides an adequate barrier between east Philly and Baghdad... err, I mean Camden. You can go as far east in Pennsylvania as you like and be fine.
Philadelphia is sort of an inversion of the stereotypical "ghetto in the middle, suburb surrounding" model, the main line being an exception to this.
If I were to move back, I would probably outside of the 'city' Philly along the main line. Lowest grime-factor there is, as far as I know.
I walked all over the city looking at neighborhoods. If I were doing it over, I'd start at one river and walk down Market to the other, then back on Walnut, then back on Pine, then back on South. That's like 3-4 hours and gives a good feel for the area.
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.
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.
Fire and public safety, and their corresponding pensions, make up the bulk (like often >50%) of all municipal expenditures.
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.
It is not the public someone who wants to run on that platform has to fear
Best of luck to you. It seems like you have the smarts to get noticed for your merit.
It's nice to see stuff like this coming out of Philly.
Obama's Budget Proposal (from 2010): http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
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).
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.
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 :)
gov 2.0 <3
The prisons department needs a lot of toughbooks. How many toughbooks do you get for a million dollars?
Is there a term limit or something? They're both dems.