An interactive explorer for understanding where the City of San Diego gets money, where that money goes, and what the major budget tradeoffs actually look like.
Public budget discussions are often passionate but short on shared facts. When the City asks where it should save money, people understandably defend the services and benefits they use. At the same time, many people oppose new fees, higher taxes, paid parking, or other ways of increasing revenue.
Those preferences are individually reasonable, but they cannot all be met at once. A balanced budget requires choices among services, staffing, capital projects, fees, taxes, reserves, and other funding sources.
This project aims to make those choices easier to understand. It gives residents a practical way to research the budget before arguing for a cut, a restoration, or a new source of revenue.
- Make the City's published budget approachable without hiding its complexity.
- Show both sides of the budget: where revenue comes from and where spending goes.
- Let people drill from citywide totals into funds, departments, programs, expense categories, salary components, and capital projects.
- Make large budgets, such as Police, Fire-Rescue, Public Utilities, Parks & Recreation, and Transportation, easier to inspect.
- Help residents compare the scale of a proposed saving or revenue increase with the full budget.
- Preserve links to official sources and distinguish enacted amounts, draft details, reconciled totals, and derived groupings.
- Support informed disagreement rather than advocate for a particular tax, fee, department, service, or political position.
The page provides interactive flow and pie-chart views of San Diego's FY2027 budget. Users can follow revenue into funds, inspect department budgets, and continue into the most detailed published categories available in the current dataset.
The General Fund is represented as a shared pool. Property tax, sales tax, and other General Fund revenue sources are not presented as if they directly pay for a specific department. Instead, the explorer shows the sources entering the common pool and the departments drawing from it. This avoids inventing allocations that the official budget does not make.
The explorer combines final adopted totals with the latest available detailed draft tables. The interface labels the basis of each value because final department totals and draft program detail do not always match.
The project does not infer that a particular revenue dollar paid for a particular service, and it does not proportionally alter published line items to force draft details to match final totals. Reconciliations and derived groupings are identified explicitly.
See the methodology for the data model, accuracy levels, and known reconciliations.
Serve the repository from its root:
python3 -m http.serverThen open:
http://localhost:8000/site/
The HTML also contains an embedded copy of the dataset so it can be opened as a standalone file. After changing the external JSON, update that copy with:
node scripts/sync-embedded-data.mjssite/index.html— standalone interactive applicationsite/san_diego_budget_hierarchy.json— normalized budget datasetsan_diego_budget_explorer_methodology.md— methodology and reconciliation notesscripts/sync-embedded-data.mjs— keeps the standalone HTML data in sync
Contributions should remain source-backed, politically neutral, and explicit about uncertainty. Prefer correcting the highest-level data source or parsing rule over patching a misleading value only in the interface.