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"Best Practices" Budgets Needed on Pottstown
Government Web Sites
Both Pottstown Borough and the Pottstown School District publish budgets on their Web sites. But both could be improved to be more informative and useful.
Pottstown Borough publishes a 48-page budget document for 2011, but it omits such basics as the function of each department, the number of employees, and what they do. There’s no way to figure out how much each employee is paid. The school district’s published budget similarly lacks detail.But properly formatted, a budget can illuminate the functions of government better than any other resource. The City of Bethlehem’s has one of the best published Web sites in Pennsylvania. It contains a well-organized budget that outlines the function of each department, the achievements of each department in the previous year, and goals for the coming year. The budget lists the number of people employed and their salaries. It includes a thumbnail description of all government grants. Although the 322-page document is detailed, it is easy to navigate.
For example, look at the Table of Contents page, below.
Each function of government is clearly differentiated.
The number of employees in each department is listed.
Now let’s look at an example of how the budget is detailed:
Page 31 contains a simple graph showing how each department is organized.
The purpose of each department is described, together with a list of goals and objectives, and prior year achievements.
The number of employees in the department are listed by job title, and their salaries.
The purchases of the department are also listed.
Bethlehem lumps together all the fringe benefits such as medical, life, and long-term disability insurance, Social Security payments, and pension payments under the heading of General Expenses.
To view Bethlehem’s entire budget, click here.
The City of Erie provides an even more detailed list of its employees as part of its budget which it calls the Personnel Roster. The Personnel Roster lists each employee (by job title), whether the employee is full-time or part-time, and the employee’s salary. Erie calculates Social Security, health insurance, workmen’s compensation and pension payments by department.
To view Erie’s Personnel Roster, click here.
A major goal of Pottstown Borough and the Pottstown School District should be to search for best practices in reporting information -- especially budget information -- and incorporate those practices on their Web sites.
Until then, Pottstown Citizens for Responsible Government has placed personnel cost information on its Web site.
For Borough personnel costs, click here.
For the School District, click here.