Politics & Government

'TownStats:' Putting Every Municipality on the (Online) Map

Budgets for all 566 state municipalities expected to be accessible by summer.

Have you ever been curious about a town you visited, or a town you heard of, and looked up its statistics online? Wikipedia can be pretty useful for this, albiet on an exclusively curious level.

But, what if you could go deeper, accessing the most up-to-date statistics for those towns, as well as their budgets and the budgets of comparable municipalities?

That is at its core the basis for The TownStats Project, organized by The Independent Center, a non-profit public policy organization, and funded by members of The Fund for New Jersey, based in New Brunswick, and , which both allocated $25,000 of initial seed money to launch townstats.org, a "non-profit, non-partisan online database designed to give you access to important information on your town, its budget, and its taxes in a format that makes it easy to make comparisons with other towns," according to the website, currently in the Beta stage.

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Members of the project including Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation President and CEO Christopher Daggett, Fund for New Jersey trustee Tom Byrne and Mark Magyer, of The Independent Center, met at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation headquarters in Morristown on Wednesday, March 2, to discuss how the site works, its benefits and what they anticipate it will become going forward.

As of the meeting, all 566 muncipalities had current statistical data available, with 54 2010 budgets online, including Middetown Township in Monmouth County, Middle Township in Cape May County, Elizabeth and Summit in Union County, Hoboken in Hudson County and Montclair and Newark in Essex County. Budget information for Morristown was not on the site as of the meeting, with Mendham Borough currently the only Morris County municipality with budget information available.

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Information has been gathered from several sources, including census data and, for the preliminary budgets inputed, by getting budget information from select municipalities.

However, Magyer said every muncipality's page would be complete by summer.

"We only started working on this thing at the end of November," he said. "We just want to make this available to everyone. Eventually, (we are hoping) it becomes the gameplan for municipalities to submit Excel spreadsheets, and then we just feed them in."

According to the TownStat website, the New Jersey Municipal Budget Project was conceived by Tom Byrne and Chris Daggett, co-chairs of the Property Tax and Cost-Cutting Task Force of the Citizens' Campaign: Jersey Call to Service. "They were frustrated by the fact that municipal budgets, employee salary data and other critical municipal government information was not readily available to citizens, public officials, community activists, journalists and academics," according to the website. Several of the organizers for the TownStats project first met while involved in Daggett's Independent campaign for governor in 2009.

Magyer, also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University, said the site can be useful to many people, including people who want to be more informed of how money is being spent in their towns, as well as other comparable towns. "People could have a more informed discussion on what they want to see happen in their towns," he said. "We think making this institutional change is a way to go in the long run."

Part of that institutional change would come, project members hope, in part through muncipalities inputting their budget information directly to the site. Byrne said the budgets they did get for the Beta stage were sometimes up to 75 pages long and information was inputted manually. "The average person just gets cross-eyed," he said.

"Let’s get people looking at this and talking about it," Byrne said. "The average citizen can look at this at anytime ... pros will be able to look at this stuff and start to talk about why (any) variations exist ... We’re trying to get this so this is completely user-friendly, transparent and easy to use.

"I am hoping that more people will vote in local elections, feeling more informed. Simple as that," he said.

Harry Pozycki, chairman of the Citizens Campaign, said the project can "create competition for cost efficiencies.

"If a citizen reviews their TownStat budget and realizes their service costs for police, recreation is significantly higher than that of comparable towns … What are they doing? They’re going to compete," he said. "This allows the people to control their own property taxes."

Despite Byrne's Democrat party affiliation, or Daggett's Independent campaign two years ago, Pozycki said the TownStat Project was strictly a non-partisan affair.

"Citizens Campaign has a no blame philosophy," he said. "We have all enjoyed the times of milk and honey. And now, the circumstances require we achieve efficiency."

To see the TownStats project, visit www.townstats.org.


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