Legislative Fiscal Division demonstrates public interactive data dashboards to Senate business committee

The Senate Business, Labor and Economic Affairs Committee heard a demonstration of public data dashboards from Legislative Fiscal Division staff during a committee meeting at the Montana State Capitol. Nick Van Brown, a staffer with the Legislative Fiscal Division, led the presentation and said the tools are available on the Legislature’s website and are intended to make budget, revenue and other state and local data more accessible to legislators and the public.

The LFD demonstration showed three top tabs — budget, revenue and other data tools — with the committee’s discussion focused on the “other data tools” section, which includes local government accounting summaries, jobs and wages series, and a cost-of-living dashboard. "All of these tools, to the extent possible, they're linked online," Van Brown said, adding the dashboards pull together multiple data sets and update as source data are submitted.

Committee staffer Joe Bahn demonstrated the jobs and wages dashboard and said it draws on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Bahn showed historical series from the late 1990s through 2024 and noted the dashboards separate wages/salaries by NAICS industry category. He cited…