Municipal Government Spending: A Tale of Two Budgets (Lawrence as an example)
A recent Lawrence Eagle-Tribune article (http://www.eagletribune.com/punews/local_story_306013132.html) entitled “Lawrence has $9.5M deficit, DOR says” stated that the city of Lawrence “municipal budget is roughly $80 million”. Knowing that much more than that is spent on the Lawrence school system alone, it is clear there is something wrong with those numbers. Thankfully, the city has to file financial statements and report revenues and taxation to the state Department of Revenue.
Digging around on the state Department of Revenue web site, one can find the “Division of Local Services”, and a series of “At a Glance” reports which include, among other pieces of information, the Schedule A for the city. If the figure $80,000,000 is in that report somewhere, it is not obvious. What is clear is that for fiscal year 2008, total spending was $327,617,787 — four times the “municipal budget”. As we have seen with state government, we again see two very different figures for “budget” versus total spending. Lawrence is more skewed than most municipalities in Massachusetts, perhaps largely because over 70% of its municipal revenue comes from state government — meaning from the taxpayers of the other 350 cities and towns around the state.
Tags: Budget, Department of Revenue
One reason this distinction is so important is because while $9.5M represents about 11.8% of $80M, it is only about 2.9% of $327M. That difference is huge, and the latter number is certainly something the city of Lawrence can find a way to deal with.