[TRU Research] Cutting the cops

[Stephen DeSanto]

Looking just now, very slight discrepancies for housing (few $100k) and
human services ($4M), pretty big difference for police ($398M 2019 in the
PDF
<https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/FinanceDepartment/19adoptedbudget/SPD.pdf>
vs $363M 2019 in OpenData
<https://data.seattle.gov/Finance/Approved-Budget-by-Department-over-Time/453y-h2ti>).
Maybe there's some budgeting nuance I just don't understand -- definitely
not a municipal finance expert -- but, like, the 2018 numbers match exactly
between sources.

On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 10:59 AM Katie Wilson <katie at transitriders.org>
wrote:

> You are probably correct, but I don’t understand why they would have “old”
> or otherwise incorrect data in there. I have emailed Open.Data at seattle.gov to
> ask for a clarification, and I’m asking a couple of councilmembers too.
> Hopefully we can get an answer Monday or Tuesday. It’s annoying because the
> graphs are great for telling stories but we need correct numbers, too! Did
> you happen to check whether the 2019 numbers match between the pdf and the
> opendata site? If it’s all good up to 2019, in a pinch we can just make
> graphs that end in that year and tell a fine story.
>
> On Jun 7, 2020, at 10:55 AM, Stephen DeSanto <rachidian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That's a very good question. Now that you mention it, there's
> discrepancies between the "adopted budget" for the Office of Housing, too:
> The OpenBudget
> <https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2020/operating/0/department/Housing/0/service?vis=lineChart>
> data (the cool charts) put 2020's "approved budget" at $69M, but looking at the
> PDF for the "adopted" budget
> <https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/FinanceDepartment/20adoptedbudget/OH.pdf>,
> that might not include over $70m in proceeds from the Mercer sale and has
> the budget at $130M for 2020. When I looked at some of the data for past
> years, OpenBudget numbers match the PDF versions exactly. So, my assumption
> here is that OpenBudget's data for 2020 might be a little old, and the PDF
> versions are more likely to be correct?
>
>
>
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