We’re at a catch 22 when it comes to Windsor’s municipal budget. The current documents provided by the city are full of terms like ‘minor capital’ and ‘purchased services.’ Terms which do very little to explain to the reader where money is coming from and what it is going to.

But is Windsor’s budget in such a difficult to understand format because no one cares to read it, or does no one care to read it because it’s so difficult to understand?

According to the city’s open data catalogue, the budget documents had 534 unique page views in the last thirty days. While this is only about 1% of the most popular page on Windsor’s website (Transit Windsor’s routes and schedules page, which has had 45,932 unique page views), it shows a definite interest in Windsor’s financial situation.

Municipalities like Mississauga and Toronto have put effort into making their budget easy to understand for residents. They begin with simple explanations and let users work through the information as deep as they would like to go.

The City of Windsor hasn’t quite made it to this point yet, but there are some city councillors working towards it. Ward 3 Councillor Rino Bortolin says that it is an idea that has been discussed among some of the councillors.

When deliberating on the new budget councillors were provided with four to six binders full of information, according to Bortolin. This was then cut down to the 279 pages currently available online. With such a large amount of information, it is a daunting task to begin breaking it down into easily digestible parts. So how does one know what information Windsorites want to pull from their budget? Ask them.

Sofia & Christian “A total budget. What we have to spend. What has been spent. Where it all goes…And some information on specific [projects].”

Randy “I might care about how well our parks are taken care of…I want to know how much money they’re actually putting into that.”

Now with an idea of what people care to see, we set out to start creating a user-friendly version of Windsor’s annual budget.

While residents have a lot of different requests they seem to be after more basic information than the onslaught of data and jargon currently provided. In this case the basics are a great starting point. We want to provide people with clear information that relates to what they want to see and still allow them to get into the finer details if they wish.

Using information from the open data catalogue on the city website’s page views, it will be possible to see if a friendlier version of the budget makes a difference in resident participation with it.

To take this story further we would like to speak with more local residents on what they hope to find in the city’s budget. We would also like to speak with a couple more city councillors and David Soave, manager, operating budget and financial administrator in the finance department.