If you've been on the City of Santa Fe's budget department's website in the past couple years, you may have noticed that the last item posted was the budget for the 2007 fiscal year, which is now obsolete, because we don't live in the 2007 fiscal year. Chances are also that you've lived here longer than I have and made terms with Santa Fe not being the most diligent municipality when it comes to the Internet.
Today, though, the department posted this year's budget, which you can see in its 232-page entirety. Read up and use your esoteric knowledge to impress those who don't care. Try this one: "Did you know that last year, the city budgeted $71,000 in revenues from cigarette taxes, but this year, they didn't budget any? I thought not."
The city's budgeted expenses this year add up to about $72 million—about $5 million less than last year, and just a pocketful of change more than ites revenues.
It's not quite where the city hinted it might go with a full website dedicated to city finances (nor as utopic as the Journal implied with that lead). And unlike in Albuquerque, we don't get to go wild in the Cognos Powerplay Cube to analyze city tax revenues (it's really just a prettier spreadsheet). Still, that supposed bastion of transparency hasn't upload a full financial report since 2008. So, in a way, we win.
