The city's proposed budget for next year runs 412 pages. It contains, somewhere, every dollar the city plans to spend and every dollar it expects to collect. Almost no resident will ever read it, and the city has made no real effort to change that.
This is not a complaint about the budget itself, which by most accounts is a reasonable document written by people who know what they are doing. It is a complaint about the fact that knowing what is in it requires either a finance degree or a week of evenings, and most residents have neither to spare. This board has read all 412 pages, more than once, and can say plainly that the information residents most want, how much of their money is going where, is in there, buried between procurement schedules and fund transfer tables that only make sense to someone who wrote them.
A two-page fix
Other cities our size publish a plain-English summary alongside the full budget: where the money comes from, where it goes, and what changed from last year, in two pages a resident can read over breakfast. Some produce a one-page graphic. None of this requires new software or a consultant's contract. It requires an afternoon from someone who already understands the budget and a willingness to write for a reader who does not.
The city's own budget office could produce this. The mayor's communications staff, three people whose entire job is explaining city decisions to the public, could produce this. The fact that neither has, year after year, is not a resource problem. It is a decision that transparency ends at publication rather than at understanding.
A resident who cannot find the harbor fee in a 412-page PDF is not a disengaged citizen. They are a person with a job and a family and forty minutes in the evening, being handed a document built for someone else. That resident is the same person the council asks to show up and testify at budget hearings, then wonders why so few of them do.
We are asking for one thing: a two-page summary, in plain English, attached to the front of next year's budget. It would cost the city almost nothing and would do more for public trust than any line item in the document itself.
