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Legislative Fiscal Division demonstrates new interactive local government finance tool to House committee
Summary
Legislative Fiscal Division staff demonstrated an interactive online dashboard that compiles local government accounting data (FY2018–FY2023) and offers fund-level and per-capita comparisons for 56 counties and more than 100 cities and towns.
The House Local Government Committee heard a demonstration Tuesday of a new online Local Government Dashboard from the Legislative Fiscal Division that compiles and standardizes local accounting data to show revenues, expenditures and comparisons across jurisdictions.
The tool, developed by the Legislative Fiscal Division with input from the Local Government Services Bureau, the Montana Association of Counties and the League of Cities and Towns, lets users examine fiscal-year data from 2018 through 2023, filter by county or city, and compare per-capita revenues and expenditures and inflation-adjusted dollar amounts. "We've utilized the BARS chart of accounts to put names behind the account numbers that come in on that accounting data," said Ethan Bergen, Legislative Fiscal Division, demonstrating how the dashboard maps numeric account codes to categories such as general property tax, intergovernmental revenue and public safety expenditures.
Why it matters: committee members said the dashboard could make it easier to answer…
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