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Legislative fiscal staff demonstrate MARA data tools for lawmakers
Summary
Legislative Fiscal Division staff showed interactive data dashboards from the MARA program — covering state and local government finances, school district budgets, pensions and personal services — and answered lawmakers’ questions about using the tools for county- and district-level analysis.
Nick Van Brown, a staff member with the Legislative Fiscal Division, briefed the House State Administration Committee on data tools produced under the MARA committee, saying the tools assemble multiple data sources into interactive dashboards for legislators and the public.
"More and more, we are producing data tools, that will go online for you and the public," Van Brown said, explaining the suite includes a budget tool that updates through session and an HJ 2 revenue forecast tool.
The committee heard how the dashboards combine multiple live data sources so users can cross-reference items such as wildfire hazard potential with housing values, or compare local government revenues and expenditures across municipalities. Van Brown said the local government tool pulls general ledger data for cities and counties and has eight pages of reports that allow drilling down into revenues such as property taxes and expenditures such as public safety and public works.
Sam Schaefer, also with the Legislative Fiscal Division, described pension-related work the division supports. He said the legislature funded a consulting actuary in fiscal 2024–25 to help analyze the Teachers' Retirement System (TRS) and Public Employees' Retirement System (PERS). He summarized a stress-test report that models how different investment return scenarios affect unfunded liabilities and contribution needs.
"The big one that was produced was a stress test for the two retirement systems," Schaefer said, adding that the analysis shows the systems' health is heavily dependent on investment returns and invites legislators to request further analysis.
Molly Delcurto reviewed a personal-services model that provides roughly 20 years of position and expenditure history by agency and division, with breakdowns of salary, benefits, vacancies, overtime and average cost per position budgeted (PB). She noted some dashboards contain information that cannot be published publicly because of personally identifiable information and that legislators may be granted access on request.
Committee members asked practical questions about using the tools. Representative Bernd asked whether the school-district dashboards could show all districts within a county; Van Brown said the office can add a county filter to display all districts in a county, while noting some districts cross county lines. Representative Fyant asked whether county election office setups would be visible in the local-government dashboards; Van Brown demonstrated navigating to Lewis and Clark County and showed the revenue and expenditure pages.
Van Brown said other states have asked the Legislative Fiscal Division how it developed MARA tools and that the program grew out of multi-year work to provide faster, more accessible legislative data.
The presenters invited legislators to request tailored analyses and, for dashboards that cannot be publicly posted, to meet with staff for secure review of the underlying data.
The committee recessed after the presentation and proceeded with hearings later in the morning.
