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Salem Launches Visual Budget

User-friendly website displays budget info in simple graphical format
Posted on: June 15, 2016 - 3:47pm

Mayor Kim Driscoll today announced that the City’s Visual Budget has launched and is now available for the public to view. It can be found by clicking the link at the bottom of www.salem.com/FY17.

The Visual Budget is a graphic tool that displays all of the positive investments being made in the City in FY17 and years past, back to FY12, by area and department. Viewers can enter their annual property tax amount and see how much of their taxes is going to each part of the City budget, like schools, police and fire, and more. There are also tabs for information on funds and receipts, as well as historical data going back six years.

All of the data in the Visual Budget is open source and can be downloaded for free by following the links on the Visual Budget page.

“I am very excited to announce the launch of our Visual Budget,” said Mayor Driscoll. “This was a critical piece of the transparency agenda that was announced in this year’s State of the City address in January. A Visual Budget is a simple, user-friendly, open-source website that allows anyone to get a quick snapshot glance at how we are carefully and strategically investing public tax dollars to improve our City.”

The FY17 budget is focused on making Salem a working City – with investments in streets, sidewalks, and infrastructure – a safe City – with support for added police services, traffic calming, and a new initiative targeting the opiates epidemic – and a level 1 City – with expanded funding for continuing the forward progress in the public schools. Salem’s fiscal planning and transparency have resulted in affirmation of the City’s historic high AA bond rating and its regular receipt of recognitions and awards from the Government Finance Officers Association.

Salem is one of only a handful of Massachusetts communities who annually qualify for both a Certificate of Excellence for its Comprehensive Annual Financial Reporting (CAFR) and a Distinguished Budget Award from the GFOA. In FY2016 Salem received its tenth GFOA award for the CAFR and its eighth for the budget.