The County of Humboldt continuously looks for ways to promote transparency and help residents better understand their government. The county today launched a new application, “Open Budget,” a tool that is designed to let you easily explore the county’s budget with the hope that you will gain a clearer picture of how the county is spending money, and where those funds come from.
You can access Open Budget at openbudget.humboldtgov.org and on the county’s website at humboldtgov.org.
Open Budget is a powerful program that presents financial information through an interactive, on-line platform. It displays revenue sources and expenditures for the yearly operating budget down to line item details. In addition, the county is committed to ensuring that you know how funds are spent from Measure Z, the half-cent sales tax passed by voters in 2014, and we have dedicated a portion of this application to that effort.
You can watch a short video that explains how to use Open Budget.
Open Budget gives users the ability to easily convert data from graphs to tables and to download raw data for further analysis. You can choose the level of details you’re looking for, from finding out how much an individual department or division spends on an item, to the entire county. The application also allows you see how that spending has changed over time.
This new tool is only one of many ways citizens can interact with Humboldt County and the budget process. You can also attend or watch the yearly Interactive, Multi-Site Community Budget Meeting, which takes place on March 3. In addition, you can submit comments at the county’s Open Humboldt discussion forum, where we are currently looking for your feedback regarding Open Budget.
The Open Budget application is the product of a partnership with Socrata, Inc., which provides cloud solutions for open data and data-driven governments.