Interactive budget tool could teach riders Metro tradeoffs

Los Angeles is facing a $400 million budget gap for next year, and has created an interactive tool to let residents play around with different levels of cuts and revenue increases to close it.

The tool presents users with a set of choices for cuts to libraries, the fire department, capital projects and more, and potential revenue increases such as higher stormwater fees or selling off future parking revenue in a public-private partnership. Each time the user makes a choice, it shows the budget impact and the remaining gap.

Explanatory information about each area or next to each choice helps the user understand the pros and cons of each level of cuts or revenue increases.

It would be great to have something like this for the WMATA FY2011 budget. Or, at the very least, it’d be great to have the information about options to build something like this ourselves. In fact, perhaps we can set something like this up for the FY2010 budget tradeoff debate that’s going to happen in the next few weeks. Any Flash developers interested in throwing something together?

By the way, the options available on the LA tool make it impossible to balance the budget without entering into a public-private partnership at least for city parking structures ($100 million), if not also meters (another $100 million). That’s a bad idea, because while such a contract would encourage market-rate pricing in garages, it would also probably preclude, or at least make very difficult, any redevelopment for the term of the contract. It also brings in a big one-time windfall at the expense of future years’ budgets.