Column: If you want to go over Bloomington’s 2025 budget with a comb, use one with good teeth

Now about eight months into a four-year term, Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson has released her first proposed annual city budget budget.

The draft 2025 budget will be presented to the city council in a four-day series of meetings, beginning on Monday (Aug. 26), all set to start at 5:30 p.m. in city council chambers. Meeting access information is posted on the city council’s web page.

The actual final “budget”—which is supposed to be presented to the city council on Sept. 25—will consist of six separate ordinances.

Three salary ordinances are in the mix, one each for: elected officials; firefighters and police officers; and for non-union and AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees). Three appropriation ordinances have to be approved, one each for: the city of Bloomington; city of Bloomington utilities; and for Bloomington Transit.

What was released last week was a 383-page document that includes some numbers, some facts, and a description of goals, department by department, and hoped-for outcomes for 2025. It’s the so-called “budget book.”

Two basic questions answered by the budget book are: How much COLA (cost of living allowance) can employees expect this year? How many new positions are funded in this proposed budget?

The city is aiming to increase compensation by 3 percent. And there are five new positions: city homelessness coordinator (mayor’s office); grant compliance manager (HAND); additional neighborhood compliance officer/rental inspector (HAND); capital projects manager (economic and sustainable development); service and capital coordinator (public works, fleet).

A budget comb with few teeth

Answers to finer-grained questions are harder to find.

That’s due in part to a bad design element that Thomson’s first budget book shares with her predecessor’s budget materials: At the end of each department’s section, there’s a breakdown of budget numbers, with rows for fund, category, and description, and columns for 2022 Actual, 2023 Actual, 2024 Adopted, and the 2025 proposal.

The breakdown is presented as 117 pages sprinkled through a 383-page document. That makes the numbers hard, if not impossible to use for analysis, especially across departments.

The numbers don’t even include columns for 2022 Adopted or 2023 Adopted. And what about years before 2022?

What if I want to check out expenditures for postage by the animal shelter (budgeted versus actual) in 2017?

Going back to 2017 for both budgeted and actual numbers would mean a total of 17 columns—which would become a challenge to fit on the page

The word I’ve heard out of the mayor’s office is: The city council wants these 117 pages in the budget book. Those pages reportedly took five people working long hours over many days to create.

It reflects poorly on a majority of the council that they have requested information in a form that is practically useless, when a better solution is not just possible—it’s one that the B Square has already almost completely implemented.

(In 2017, the animal shelter had $1,033 in its budget for postage and spent just  $755.49 of it.)

Building a better budget comb—one with lots of teeth

The city’s online financial system offers a one-click download for the whole dataset that councilmembers should insist that the administration provide to them in a usable spreadsheet. Visit the data page of that system, and download the “operating” data.

That’s the raw data, which can be imported into a spreadsheet for building whatever pivot tables anyone likes. Here’s a link: Google Sheet of COB operating data 2017-2024.

That shared Google Sheet includes a pre-built pivot table that provides data in virtually the same format as the 117 pages in the budget book. But the spreadsheet includes budgeted and actuals back to 2017, plus year-to-date numbers for 2024. It’s the tab labeled “By Department ALL Departments.”

The only thing the Google Sheet is missing is a column for the proposed 2025 numbers.

That’s where city controller Jessica McClellan has already helped this cause—by responding to a B Square request for data in a better format by providing some 2025 proposed numbers, together with corresponding adopted 2024 figures, in a spreadsheet.

There are still a few pieces missing from McClellan’s data, which prevented merging everything. But even as a standalone dataset, it is a big improvement over the 117 pages in the budget book. Here’s a link: Google Sheet of 2025 compared to 2024 adopted numbers.

Using the better budget comb, to part money in a straight line

Over the last few years, The B Square has worked enough with the numbers to see that for items like advertising, printing, postage, exterminator services—and a raft of other similar, less glorious expenditure items—the proposed budget number for a given year is typically a simple carryover from last year’s budgeted number.

Why should a department put $1,500 in the budget every year for exterminator services, including this year, when the only actual expenditure in the last eight years came in 2017—for $85?

To test out the better budget comb, The B Square excluded the categories of capital and personnel, excluded parks and recreation and utilities, and chose just a subset of the account lines in services and supplies.

For each line, The B Square then calculated the average of expenditures for the last three full years (2021, 2022, and 2023) and the average of adopted budgeted amounts. The B Square then took the 2024 approved amount and subtracted 66 percent of the difference between adopted and actual expenditures, and set that number as the “formula budget” for 2025.

The 66 percent is arbitrary. The idea was to start ratcheting the budgeted numbers down to something closer to the actual need. For the case of the example using exterminator services, the “formula budget” works out to $510 instead of $1,500.

It’s worth noting that for many items, the 2025 proposed budget is less than the 2024 budget, or even less than the “formula budget.“ So it’s not the case that every adopted 2024 number has been carried over thoughtlessly by the Thomson administration to the 2025 proposal.

However, for the limited set of items considered by The B Square, the administration’s proposal for 2025 is $7,090,468, compared to a “formula” budget of $4,214,432 for a difference of $2,876,035.

Why isn’t that the headline?

It’s not the headline for a couple of reasons. First, this approach is fraught with potential for misanalysis, because it’s pure bean counting. Also, if your limited set of data doesn’t include a key type of expenditure, you can wind up analyzing something as an increase, when it is in reality basically flat—because one type of expense has been moved to a different line.

That’s likely what accounts for the legal department’s increase in “dues and subscriptions” from $29,257, which was adopted for 2024, up to a proposed figure of $138,140 for 2025. It’s likely the case that some dues and subscriptions had previously been paid out of the “other services and charges” line, which is proposed to decrease from $118,500 to $3,000.

Still, these spreadsheets make it easier to focus on the places that deserve additional scrutiny. Maybe “other services and charges” need more scrutiny across departments?

In the tab labeled “other service and charges” in the Google Sheet, there’s a table of just the “other services and charges” broken down by department.

Showing significant increases in 2025 compared to 2024 for “other service and charges” are: CFRD, Engineering, Human Resources, and Planning.

Explaining those differences is part of the function of the budget book. That’s why The B Square provided links from each spreadsheet line, to the spot in the budget book where the explanation should be found.

It’s easier to do the job of fiscal oversight, if you start by judging what needs an explanation, because you have looked at the numbers. Then you can look for the story in the book that explains the mystery. If you read the story first, and you find it convincing, you might miss the fact that there are other facts that need an explanation.

During the budget hearings, CFRD might be asked to explain the $300,000 increase in “other services and charges” because an explanation does not seem to be included in the budget book.

And Human Resources might be asked to explain the roughly $609,000 increase in “other services and charges” because the explanation in the budget book lists some dollar numbers that don’t add up to that much.

The other kind of activity that is included in the explanation is “renovating the HR suite to accommodate the expanded staff.” While that could help explain the amount of the increase, that seems like a capital expense, not something to be logged under the services category.

The mayor’s office shows a big difference between the “formula budget” for these items and the proposed 2025 budget—$233,598 compared to a formula budget of $91,531. The “formula budget” is about $2,000 more than the adopted 2024 budget for these items.

The difference is due mostly to a big increase in “Mgt. Fee, Consultants, and Workshops”.

Part of the explanation in the budget book goes like this:

The change in Other Services is attributable to work related to transparency, public engagement, and economic development and includes:

• $110,000 to engage CivicBrand in a community visioning process to define Bloomington’s identity and develop compelling messaging and visual assets, as recommended in the 2016 Wage Growth Task Force report. This brand identity will be implemented in an update of the City of Bloomington website, new economic development and community promotion tools, HR recruiting materials, and more.

It would be surprising if that item does not get some scrutiny from city councilmembers next Thursday.

Next week’s schedule of events

MONDAY, AUGUST 26
Mayor’s Intro
Controller’s Intro
HR Intro
Bloomington Fire Department
Bloomington Police Department / Dispatch
Community & Family Resources

TUESDAY, AUGUST 27
Economic & Sustainable Development
Parks & Recreation
Public Works
Administration
Animal Care & Control
Facilities Maintenance
Fleet Maintenance
Parking Services
Sanitation
Street Operations

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28
Bloomington Housing Authority
Housing & Neighborhood Development (HAND)
Planning & Transportation
Engineering
Bloomington Transit
City of Bloomington Utilities

THURSDAY, AUGUST 29
Office of the City Clerk
Common Council
Office of the Mayor
Information & Technology Services (ITS)
Human Resources
Legal
Office of the Controller (including CIB)

Mayor’s Office Budget for Selected Items

City Council Office Budget for Selected Items