Borough unveils graphics-focused tool for budget

WASILLA — Local residents can now get a helping of pie graphs to go with their holiday pies.

The Mat-Su Borough’s “budget visualization tool” went live in late December, and is intended to supplement the borough Comprehensive Annual Financial Review (CAFR) according to a borough press release. The CAFR consists of more than 200 pages of tables and figures, and adheres to what are known in government circles as “generally accepted auditing standards.” The borough budget document can run as high as 800 pages.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the documents can be challenging to the layperson, said borough spokeswoman Patty Sullivan.

“Our budget is something like 800 pages and it’s dense numbers, and if that’s not your aptitude, it can be challenging

The project is a joint effort by the borough’s finance and IT departments. It uses the third-party platform OpenGov to generate charts and summon detailed department information based on borough-provided figures, and follows years of advocacy on the part of both voters and elected officials, according to Sullivan.

“Assembly member (Jim) Sykes is certainly an advocate for it, as are certain residents,” she said.

Instead of reading through hundreds of pages of information, users can pull up particular departments to get details.

The new tool — which costs about $22,000 for 12 months of use — allows users to pull up a broad overview of the full budget picture, then allows them to single out specific facts, figures, and other information from fiscal years 2012 to 2016. The charts also differentiate between the budgeted figure for a particular category and the actual amount expended.

For example, the mayoral salary in 2012 was $22,068 as opposed to the $34,506 budgeted. Since the 2013 fiscal year, the mayor’s salary (which does not yet include the salary of sitting mayor Vern Halter, since the 2015 fiscal year figures aren’t yet included) has hovered around $19,300. Benefits, which consist entirely of a health insurance contribution, vary between $33,819 in 2012 and $34,610 in 2014. Counting health insurance, travel expenses, postage, advertising, and a new computer, the mayor accounted for $71,734 of borough expenses in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014. That’s less than half the amount spent on, for example, information technology salaries (almost $200,000) in the same year, according to the figures on the new tool.

However, Sullivan cautioned against making hasty generalizations about the information on the program. The new tool does not include salaries broken out by individual employees within a department.

The tool also doesn’t include information about the hours worked by a largely part-time mayor, or that cost relative to the cost of the full-time mayor of Anchorage, for example, Sullivan said.

Sullivan said she doesn’t mind having the information online.

“We’re public servants, and that’s the way it is,” she said. “I guess it would bother me if someone didn’t understand the salary’s merit.”

The borough budget tool officially went live on Dec. 23. It’s available online at matsuak.opengov.com.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.