Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Local Government Data Tool topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Legislative Fiscal Division debuts interactive local government data tool for counties and cities
Summary
The Legislative Fiscal Division demonstrated a new interactive dashboard that links six years of trial-balance local government accounting data to BARs chart-of-accounts codes, allowing lawmakers and the public to compare revenues, expenditures and per-capita metrics across Montana jurisdictions.
The Senate Local Government committee on [date not specified] heard a demonstration of a new interactive local government data tool from the Legislative Fiscal Division intended to give lawmakers and the public clearer, comparable views of municipal and county finances. "For the record, Nick Van Brown...with the legislative fiscal division," said Nick Van Brown, who introduced the session. "This data is new data that we've been getting...from the local governments."
Ethan Bergen, who led the live demonstration, described the dataset as trial-balance information derived from local governments' general ledgers and standardized by linking accounting strings to the BARs chart of accounts. "This is trial balance data...a summarized version of this," Bergen said. He showed visuals that separate revenues (taxes and assessments, intergovernmental grants, charges for services) and expenditures (public safety, public works, personal services, debt service), and demonstrated filters that compare counties, cities and population bands.
Bergen used jurisdiction examples to show how the dashboard can surface trends and detail. He said Yellowstone County's taxes and assessments were just under $45,000,000 in fiscal year 2018 and just over $61,000,000 in fiscal year 2023. Using Gallatin County as an expenditure example, he showed total expenditures of roughly $85,385,400 in a reported year and noted that personal services made up just under 51% of that total in the displayed example.
The tool supports per-capita comparisons and an option that excludes the selected jurisdiction from the comparison set to avoid skewing results. Bergen illustrated that Jefferson County's per-capita taxes and assessments were about $616 in FY2023 compared with about $583 for the rest of the state's counties in that comparison set. He also switched to the municipality tab to show city-level differences, noting that cities tend to have larger shares of charges for services (for example, water utilities) while counties tend to rely more heavily on taxes and assessments.
Other features include population-band groupings (counties broken into five population bands and cities into four bands), drill-downs to expenditure objects (personal services, capital outlay, debt service) and an inflation-adjustment that converts past years to 2023 dollars. Bergen used Great Falls as an example to demonstrate inflation-adjusted declines in charges for services.
Committee members asked about data timing, population adjustments and whether special districts are included. Bergen said FY2024 data are being collected (due to the Local Government Services Bureau at year-end) and that the dashboard provides per-capita and other comparison pages; he said the county views shown do not include special districts unless the county submitted those consolidated values.
The Legislative Fiscal Division said it developed the comparison features after consultation with the Local Government Services Bureau, the Montana Association of Counties and the League of Cities and Towns; those partners also assisted in collecting the files used to build the dashboard. "A lot of these comparison tools came from conversations with them," Bergen said.
The demonstration concluded without committee action; several senators praised the presentation and the committee recessed briefly before moving to executive action on the day's bills.
