In response to calls from the public and advocacy groups, the City of Portland is undertaking a project to map our budget geographically. We’re looking at doing a series of maps, allocating revenue and expenses to 8 sub areas in our city, both for the total city budget and by individual bureaus.

Use of GIS and budget data in this way seems to be relatively new and I’m looking for other jurisdictions who may have undertaken similar projects to glean any wisdom I can that may add value to our process. In particular, we’re honing in our methodology to allocate revenue and expenses based on specific location and reviewing potential metrics to normalize that funding data by population density, jobs, etc.