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Rachael Ludwick

Tomorrow will be two weeks since I asked for proposed city budget data in a format that's not a pdf or glossy diagram. Have had no reply (from Strauss' office or the budget office). Sigh.

I emailed a followup request on 10/31 and still no. If I want to do any data analysis comparing year over year budgets before they vote I will have to extract from PDFs. SIGH.

The city has a "budget dashboard" that uses PowerBI. It is wildly inaccessible. Visit here and then open it in the "full screen" mode in a new tab: seattle.gov/council/issues/bud

Alternately, there are PDFs on the city budget office: seattle.gov/city-budget-office

(The main PDF does not seem to work terribly with my screenreader but that might just be not knowing how to control VO in preview very well.)

I can haz data! Someone from CBO got back to me.

There's a DIFFERENT budget portal that is better than teh PowerBI: openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year

Exporting each section though is super annoying.

However, I have re-downloaded from data.seattle.gov/City-Administ (updated Nov 4, 2024) which now seems to have proposed 2025 data. It did NOT exist when I downloaded on Oct 9, 2024. Also some simple checks on the updated CSV suggests it's the same as the open budget portal I was pointed at so yay!

openbudget.seattle.govSeattle Open BudgetOpen Budget is part of our commitment to improving transparency by providing a guided view through complex financial information.

@rachael Does the PDF have selectable text at least, or is it in image form?

@sdwilsh Havent tried yet. I know of libraries that can extract more programmatically anyway. the real challenge is mapping the line items to the open data CSVs they publish for previous years.