Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

montgomery county budget calculator

Yesterday, the Montgomery County, Md., county council voted on its 2009 budget. As part of our coverage, we rolled out a budget calculator game to allow users to try their hand at balancing the county’s budget. For revenues, the numbers in the left column represent the budget recommendations made by County Executive Isiah Leggett; the user-editable numbers in the right column represent “current state” — the present-day income tax, property tax and homeowner tax credit. Users also can save their budget numbers and compare notes with other users on the Maryland Moment blog.

Credit for this graphic also goes to Metro producer Laura Cochran and Post reporter Ann E. Marimow.

For tools like these, if I’m able I try to build them out in such a way that they can be repurposed for other purposes or jurisdictions. In this case, most of the expense and revenue items are defined dynamically, fed in via an XML file that defines each line-item’s title, proposed budget cost, initial user cost and whether it’s editable. The only exceptions: I had to hard-code in much of the property tax information because the formula was fairly complicated (and many thanks to the county’s Office of Management and Budget for their assistance in setting up / simplifying the formula), and the line-item for capital expenses and reserves was hard-coded as a percentage of the total revenue.