Erie 2026 Proposed Budget Redesigns

⚠️ I’m not affiliated with the Town of Erie—I just live here. After trying to understand the town’s budget, I realized how difficult it was to see where money was going and how it was changing year to year. Since I have a background in data visualization, I decided to redesign a few of the charts to make the information easier to reason about.

💰 Budget by Department Redesign

The current budget visualization uses a pie chart (for FY 2026) and stacked bars (for prior years). While those formats show the overall distribution, large departments dominate the view, making smaller categories—and year-to-year changes—hard to see.

Range plots make those relationships clearer. They let viewers compare each department side-by-side and immediately grasp how the proposed 2026 budget shifts relative to 2025. Instead of being overwhelmed by total size, the focus moves to change, which better supports interpretation and conversation around budget priorities.

💰 Budget By Expenditure Redesigns

Just like the “By Department” chart, the expenditure view benefits from a focus on change rather than total size. This version shows how each major spending category shifts from FY 2025 (Adopted) to FY 2026 (Proposed). Seeing growth and reduction side-by-side makes it easier to interpret where spending is expanding, contracting, or staying relatively stable.

Expenditures by Object Redesign

The Expenditures by Object section of the official proposal was especially difficult to interpret—it used a color-coded chart with over 180 categories 😱. In this redesign, I replaced that with an interactive table, which lets readers search, sort, and explore specific items on their own.

Try sorting by column headers or searching for a term like Salaries. The 2026 Proposed column is color-scaled by expenditure quintile, helping highlight which categories represent the largest portions of spending.