{"id":988,"date":"2016-10-17T13:54:14","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T20:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=988"},"modified":"2016-10-17T13:54:14","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T20:54:14","slug":"blog-post-analyzing-funds-related-to-health-environment-and-sanitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/17\/blog-post-analyzing-funds-related-to-health-environment-and-sanitation\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post Analyzing Funds Related to Health, Environment, and Sanitation"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I decided to exam the LA Controller’s Office<\/a>‘s dataset of the compilation of funds that the city of Los Angeles disperses to projects related to Health, Environment, and Sanitation<\/a>. Despite LA’s infamy for its cloud of pollutants that engulf the city, I wanted to see how much the city council allocates to environmental projects.<\/p>\n

The dataset includes 37 different “funds” in which the total monies budgeted for environmental protection adds to roughly $390,000,000. While that number may seem large, the city of Los Angeles has nearly 4 million civilians the overall revenue that the city collects through taxes is well over 390 million. The dataset further includes the type of fund, denoted by a three digit fund number, the fund name, the department requiring the fund, and the fund’s purpose.<\/p>\n

The LA Controller’s Office’s dataset exemplified the issues discussed in the Wallack and Srinivasan article (Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in Development Information Systems<\/a>). The article examined how there exists a disconnect between the purpose for using the monies and the program’s lack of total, intended execution. For instance, nearly $19 million went fund the amenities for Sunshine Canyon; the intended purpose of the funds is to “fund the amenities for the Sunshine Canyon landfill facilities”, and gives little information on how the amenities are used, why the amenities consume a large portion of the budget, and if the funds are actually implementing environmentally safe landfill management. Additionally, there is a $5 million fund allocated to Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction, with a purpose of “for air pollution reduction projects” but little is told about what those projects are, how effective they will be, or how they will be implemented.<\/p>\n

I believe this would make the most sense to the individuals writing the budget reports and the politicians disbursing the city’s money. They are the one’s creating these budgets and the lack of detail allows them to easily justify receiving large portions of funds.<\/p>\n

This dataset demonstrates that the money collected by government may not always be used as efficiently as possible, and raises some questions as to why the descriptions are so strangely vague. It also brings into question the efficacy of these projects. Are they (the projects) really solving the problems that they are intended, if not, to what extend are they remedying the environmental issues?<\/p>\n

If I were not picking this dataset apart and perhaps an individual from Bakersfield, I would be astonished by the sheer amount of money that the city of Los Angeles sets aside for environmental projects. However, of course, Bakersfield is a lot smaller than Los Angeles and one would need to take into account the relative amount of money in addition the extremity of the environmental issues in order to assess whether or not the city is realistically making an effort to curb its pollution situations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I decided to exam the LA Controller’s Office‘s dataset of the compilation of funds that the city of Los Angeles disperses to projects related to Health, Environment, and … Continue reading “Blog Post Analyzing Funds Related to Health, Environment, and Sanitation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-988","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\/988","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\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}