{"id":692,"date":"2016-10-16T14:50:07","date_gmt":"2016-10-16T21:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=692"},"modified":"2016-10-16T14:51:26","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T21:51:26","slug":"blog-3-city-budget-expenditure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/16\/blog-3-city-budget-expenditure\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog 3: City Budget Expenditure"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the L.A. Controller\u2019s Office<\/a>, I decided to explore the City Budget Expenditure<\/a> dataset. This dataset demonstrates the how much the city of Los Angeles aims to spend as their budget compared to much how they actually spend under their expenditure. I found this dataset interesting because I\u2019ve always wondered how much money is allocated to each department from the budget and how much is actually spent by the city.<\/p>\n

 
\nThe data set is categorized by many records types: Fiscal Year, Department Name, Fund Name, Account Name, Total Expenditure, Budget Transfer In\/Out Amount, Total Budget, etc. Under each category, it allows readers to juxtapose how much money is being budgeted under a certain department as opposed to how much money is being expended from the account, and any other additional transactions to make this expenditure possible. We can begin to understand that certain departments required more funding, such as water and power.<\/p>\n

 
\nThis dataset is catered towards policy makers and city administrators to oversee the city budget to ensure that the money is being efficiently spent. And if the money is not being efficiently spent, they can continue to utilize this dataset to infer which policies need to be made in order to cater to departments that need more funding. However in order to further understand the dataset, we need to understand Wallack\u2019s and Srinivasan\u2019s article, “Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in Development Information Systems.”<\/a> They argue how \u201ctechnologies that could improve living conditions and economic opportunities [are] rejected because they were inconvenient for community practice\u201d (Wallack and Srinivasan 3). This creates a problem for policymakers because in order to be sustainable, they need to gain a better understanding on community ontologies. However, there isn\u2019t enough information on state ontologies, creating information loss.<\/p>\n

 
\nFrom this dataset, we can infer that the city officials overspend than budgeted. However what gets left out is how much of that actual money was effectively spent. If only there was a separate column specifying actual cost, we can see how much money is being spent to pay off the cost of each department\u2019s projects and fees. And if we see that the expenditure amount exceeded the total cost, we can infer that the money was being spent on inadequate costs. This excess spending could have been reallocated to a department that needs the money more.<\/p>\n

 
\nThis dataset could also be seen from the point of view of citizens and voters, who have the power to either re-elect the current government officials or elect a new one if they are unsatisfied with the current one and their contribution to the LA community. This places many government officials in a tough spot because they want to do what is best for the community but at the same time they want to spend the money efficiently, which may not be beneficial for the entire community, so finding that fine balance is really hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the L.A. Controller\u2019s Office, I decided to explore the City Budget Expenditure dataset. This dataset demonstrates the how much the city of Los Angeles aims to spend as their … Continue reading “Blog 3: City Budget Expenditure”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}