Legislative Fiscal Division demos public data tools for Business, Labor and Economic Affairs committee

HELENA — Legislative Fiscal Division staff on Monday walked the Senate Business, Labor, and Economic Affairs Committee through a suite of public, interactive data tools designed to let legislators and the public explore budget, revenue, employment and local-government finance information.

“For the record, my name is Nick Van Brown,” said Nick Van Brown, a Legislative Fiscal Division staffer who introduced the presentation and described how to access the tools on the legislature's website. Van Brown said the site groups tools under three tabs — budget, revenue and "other data tools" — and that most dashboards are interactive with drill-downs and tooltips.

The presentation included a labor and wages dashboard from Joe Bahn (LFD) that uses Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data to show jobs and wages by North American Industry Classification System sector over time. Bahn pointed to major sectors such as trade, transportation and utilities, education and private health services, and noted that dashboards change axes and scales when users filter data.

Molly Delcurto (LFD) showed the cost-of-living dashboard, which aligns with MIT methodology and compares four expenditure categories — childcare, food, housing and transportation — to county median incomes. Delcurto said housing cost figures come from HUD fair-market estimates and that childcare figures come from a market-rate survey by the Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS). “The median daily cost for a childcare center went up by $7 a day” between the 2015 and 2020 market-rate reports, Delcurto said.

Senators pressed staff on data coverage and methods. Vice Chair Trevis and others asked about nonresponse among childcare providers and whether unregistered family-care arrangements are captured. Van Brown acknowledged that nonresponse can skew specific subpopulations and said many LFD datasets are full administrative exports rather than samples, but that certain metrics rely on agency surveys. “This is taking the four major cost components, and we follow MIT's methodology pretty closely here,” he said.

On local-government finance, Van Brown said the LFD has obtained trial-balance exports from local accounting systems and mapped them to a common chart of accounts. He said the LFD has data for all counties and most cities with more than 1,000 residents but is still missing some smaller cities; he identified previous import problems with Missoula County and the city of Helena that have since been addressed in some cases. “This data comes directly from the local government's accounting systems,” Van Brown said.

Committee members asked for follow-up on a few discrete items: whether childcare providers pay a registration fee (Delcurto offered to follow up with DPHHS), the statistical thresholds for representative samples (LFD staff said they would consult statisticians for technical thresholds), and whether specific local jurisdictions remain missing from the dashboards (staff said they would identify outstanding gaps).

Van Brown provided contact information and an invitation for members to visit LFD staff in the Capitol for deeper demonstrations. Staff also reminded the committee of a Thursday site visit: a 9:30 a.m. introduction with the 340th Missile Wing and Department of Defense representatives in Room 172, followed by a 10:00 a.m. liquor warehouse tour.

The committee did not take votes on any bills during the session and adjourned after the presentation and announcements.