Under pressure from East Portland community leaders, Mayor Sam Adams has asked his budget staff to track where city funds and services are used.
Under pressure from East Portland community leaders, Mayor Sam Adams has asked his budget staff to track where city funds and services are used.
So-called “budget mapping,” launched this spring by the city Office of Management and Finance, could lay bare which areas of town are hogging all the city’s money and which are getting snubbed. The new information can enable outlying neighborhood leaders to hold city and bureau officials’ feet to the fire, in a town long dominated by folks from downtown and close-in neighborhoods.
Pinpointing spending in different parts of town is a “voyage of discovery” – designed to become a “voyage to equity,” Adams says. “This is the kind of thing the public, I think, expects government to already be doing, but it’s not.”
The budget maps break down spending and revenue collection in the city’s seven neighborhood coalition districts, plus an eighth one, the central city, created for statistical purposes. Budget analysts factored-in residents and jobs in each of the districts. So far, there’s only data from four city bureaus: transportation, police, fire and parks.
Read more at the Portland Tribune.
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