Summary

King County residents who want to better understand the county’s $5 billion budget will find new, easier to navigate charts and spreadsheets just a click away online. For the first time, the same budget materials used by Executive Dow Constantine and the County Council in their budget deliberations are available to the public in an easy, downloadable format on the County budget website.

Story

King County residents who want to better understand the county’s $5 billion budget will find new, easier to navigate charts and spreadsheets just a click away online. For the first time, the same budget materials used by Executive Dow Constantine and the County Council in their budget deliberations are available to the public in an easy, downloadable format on the County budget website.

“I’ve heard over and over from residents that they want a better understanding of how we make county budget decisions, so we put the department-level figures front and center on the budget webpage,” said Executive Constantine. “We also created an open data site that puts all of the information we work from at residents’ fingertips, so that they can search and work with it in a way that’s more accessible than it’s ever been.”

“The significant level of detail in this year’s proposed budget is the culmination of a lot of hard work to increase government transparency,” said Council Chair Bob Ferguson, prime sponsor of the budget transparency legislation. “The legislation affirmed the Executive’s and Council’s commitment to work cooperatively to ensure that the County’s budget documents are easily available and understandable for citizens, and I am pleased that the public can now easily access a detailed King County budget with the click of a button.”

In April 2009 the County Council unanimously adopted legislation to make the County’s budget process more transparent, enabling citizens to better understand where their tax dollars are spent.

Prior to adoption of the legislation, the annual King County budget provided only a single dollar appropriation for each department, with no detail on how funds were allocated to the specific lines of business within the department. Now, each department’s budget is broken down to the section level, identifying a spending plan for each major program and line of business. To view the budget breakdown by department, click View budget breakdown by department (PDF) on the budget homepage.

Since its launch last month, the online budget data in the county’s Open Data project at https://data.kingcounty.gov/ has been viewed more than 1500 times and the raw data downloaded 315 times.

The Open Data site provides access to more than 70 of the county’s most frequently requested data sets, including information about county operations, infrastructure, elections, transportation, the environment, and resident welfare.

Users of the Open Data site can interactively search and sort data, create and save personal, filtered views of data, submit comments and ratings, and share data with others. Users can also visualize data by creating charts, graphs and maps which can effectively embed live data county data for use on other websites.