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Legislative Fiscal unveils interactive local government finance dashboard
Summary
Legislative Fiscal demonstrated an interactive Local Government dashboard that compiles FY2018–FY2023 trial-balance data from counties and cities, offers fund- and program-level breakdowns, per-capita and outlier comparisons, population filters and inflation adjustments, and plans to add FY2024.
Legislative Fiscal staff demonstrated a new Local Government dashboard to the House Local Government Committee, showing an interactive tool intended to make municipal and county revenue and expenditure data easier to compare.
Ethan Bergen of the Legislative Fiscal Division said the tool compiles trial balance data from counties, cities and towns using the BARS chart of accounts and currently includes fiscal years 2018 through 2023. "We have fiscal year 2018 through 2023 data," Bergen said during the demonstration. The dashboard maps numeric account codes to descriptive categories so users can see, for example, general property tax revenues versus public-safety expenditures and personal services versus debt service.
The dashboard displays five fund types (general, special revenue, capital projects, debt service and enterprise) and provides multiple views: a revenue-and-expenditure front page, a deeper breakout by account type, a per-capita comparison that can pull out outliers, population-band filters for apples-to-apples comparisons and an inflation-adjusted view to 2023 dollars. Bergen demonstrated county examples such as Yellowstone and Broadwater and said the dataset covers 56 counties and more than 100 cities and towns in its current form.
Committee members asked practical questions about reading the legend and applying filters. Bergen showed that clicking on a category (for example, "public safety" or "personal services") highlights that series across bars and time, and confirmed that a black trend line shows the share of total revenues or expenditures coming from the selected item. He also noted the dashboard can isolate outliers (for example, Richland County) so users can compare a single jurisdiction against the rest without distortion.
The tool includes a per-capita comparison mode and population filters that group counties and cities by size; Bergen used Beaverhead and Richland counties and the city of Billings as examples. He also described an inflation adjustment feature that converts earlier fiscal years into 2023 dollars to permit year-over-year comparisons. Bergen said the fiscal office is working to add fiscal year 2024 data as audited local reports become available.
The demonstration generated procedural questions but no committee action. Bergen suggested the dashboard will help policymakers and local officials identify trends in revenue sources and spending categories and to ask follow-up questions about tax dependence, personnel costs and capital spending.
The committee paused for questions and then moved to its scheduled public hearings.
