1. Below are four different people who work for the City of Philadelphia. Put them in order from who gets paid the most to the least.
1) Mayor Nutter
2) The leader of a recreation center
3) Mayor Nutter's chief of staff
4) A security guard who protects city health centers.
2. Last year, how much did the Fire Department spend on “Small Power Tools and Small Hand Tools”?
1) $25,676
2) $81,100
3) $8,421
4) $241,584
3. Three out of four departments below are real. Which one did I make up?
1) Department of Public Property
2) Department of Utilities
3) Procurement Department
4) Sinking Fund Commission
The answers to all of these questions, and more, can be found in the giant binders pictured below.
A while back, I wrote a post about trying to find out exact costs of various boards and commissions funded by the city. At first, I had a little trouble tracking down the exact numbers. No more. A very nice person from the Office of Budget and Program Evaluation saved me a copy of the Mayor’s Operating Budget for 2009. There is information about everything you ever wanted to know about city government, but were afraid to ask. It has staggering amount of data about every single department, commission, and office in city government. I've spent the last two days looking them over and there is a lot to digest.
First off, as you can see by the pictures, these things are just really big. The information is in two binders that together must weigh at least 10 pounds. I carried them with me on the subway, which must have looked pretty funny to my fellow passengers. Page after page is filled with numbers and tables. 
There is a complete breakdown of 58 separate entities-- from the Art Museum to the Zoning Commission --that get some sort of funding from the city. I don't know the exact page count (the information is organized into subsections) but it has to be almost two thousand. Not exactly light reading.
One of the other things that jumps out at me about these binders is the difference between them and other budget documents the Nutter Administration has released to the public. For example, the "Budget in Brief", available from the Finance Department's website, has a lot of pretty graphs and text to accompany the information. You can make sense of it if you don't really know anything about city government. That's not true for the complete operating budget. If you found it on the street and started flipping through the content you'd probably get lost pretty quickly. All of the data is presented numerically in an endless series of tables. There are a few bullet points in the beginning of each section that describe the mission of the department, but that's about all.
The amount of detail in the document is also staggering. Want to know how much L&I spent on renting parking spaces last year? The number ($12,242) is right on page 13, section 49. You can find out how much each department spends on stuff like office supplies, salaries, and janitorial services. More than anything, these two binders provide a window into how complex city government really is.
There is some potentially juicy stuff as well. You can find out how much people are paid (Mayor Nutter makes $186,044; a clerk working for the Streets Department makes around $36,000). Each department has a listing of job categories and a range of salaries. I am not surprised this information is public, but I have to say that I wouldn't want the whole world knowing how much money I make. (Here is a little hint: it’s a lot closer to the clerk than the mayor.) I guess that kind of scrutiny is part of working in the public sector.
The salary stuff is interesting, but what really surprised me is the sheer number different job titles for people who work for the city. There is a lot more to local government than police officers, firefighters, and garbage collectors. Did you know that the city also employs industrial hygienists, microfilming processing supervisors, and radiographers? Now that I've looked at these binders, it makes sense why so much of the city budget ($2.4 billion) is spent on salary, pension, and other benefits. A lot of the money is spent on paying people to do jobs that you've never heard of.
Dan tipped me off to an effort in California that has taken this kind of data and turned it into a searchable database. You can visit the website of the Sacramento Bee and search for the salary of every state employee. You can even search by name. Is this a useful? Should we be putting that type of information on web? What are some other ways to organize this stuff in a way that regular folks can use?
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Here are the answers to the quiz:
Question #1: Mayor Nutter's Chief of Staff ($198,500), Mayor Nutter ($186,044), Recreation leader ($40,080), Security guard ($34,000).
Question #2: The Fire Department spent $25,676 on “Small Power Tools & Hand Tools” last year.
Question #3: There is no such thing as the Department of Utilities.
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