Questions people ask
Short answers that apply to every city on this site. Each answer has its own link, so you can share just that one.
For a city's own numbers: Berkeley's questions · Fremont's questions
No city runs it. Where the Money Went is an independent project by PlayFrame Studios. It isn't affiliated with, or endorsed by, any city government.
The numbers are each city's own, as its published documents give them. See where every number comes from.
From public documents: mostly each city's own adopted budget and budget reports, and, where a question goes beyond the city, other governments' documents, such as a school district's budget.
Every figure is a link. Tap it to see the document, the page and the exact words the figure was read from. Each city's Sources page lists every document it uses, and the data can be downloaded there.
A city's whole budget covers every fund it runs. Many of those funds can only be spent on one thing, such as sewers, parking or a grant's program. The General Fund is the part the City Council can spend on anything.
The charts of departments on this site count General Fund money. So a department's share of them is its share of the General Fund, not of everything the city spends.
They also show spending, not income: where the money goes, not where it comes from. Each city's Revenue page shows where it comes from.
Budgets count staff in full-time equivalents (FTE). A full-time position counts as one and a half-time position as half of one, so a city's total can end in a fraction. We show the figure exactly as the city's budget prints it. FTE counts budgeted positions, not people: it can include vacant positions, and the budgets we use don't say how many positions are part-time. Some cities count only regular positions and leave out hourly or seasonal staff; where a city's budget says so, its page notes it.
Public schools are run by school districts. In California, school districts are local governments of their own, alongside cities, counties and special districts, so a district's budget is separate from the city's.
Each city's FAQ names the district that serves it and links its budget.
Source: Legislative Analyst's Office (California), Understanding California's Property Taxes, p. 7
The basic 1% property tax is pooled by your county and divided under state law among the county, cities, schools and special districts.
How much each government gets generally depends on what it received in the mid-1970s, so shares differ from place to place. Your city gets only part of it; each city's FAQ gives what its own budget says about its share.
Source: Legislative Analyst's Office (California), The 1 Percent Tax: Where Does Your Money Go?, p. 1
Because cities don't all run the same services. Some provide services such as fire protection, parks and water themselves; others rely on special districts, governments with budgets of their own, for some or all of them.
So one city's chart isn't spread across the same set of services as another's, and a department's share in one city can't be read against the same department's share in another. Each city's FAQ notes services that another government provides there.
Source: Legislative Analyst's Office (California), Understanding California's Property Taxes, p. 24
Report it on GitHub. The form asks which page and what's wrong. Every figure links to the document it came from, so you can check it against that first.
Request it on the home page. We add cities in order of requests.