City budget season is in full-swing as the 2011-2012 fiscal year comes to a close for metropolitan principal city, Kansas City, Missouri. The preliminary recommended budget has been available online for several weeks now and we looked at the numbers to interpret them into a helpful infographic (also at the bottom of this post) to show where funds are allocated throughout the city government.
Kansas City, Missouri’s 2012-2013 fiscal year starts on May 1 of this year and runs through April 30 of next year. The coming year’s budget totals $1,306,155,468 divided up among 32 departments, offices and expenditure funds.
The information used to create this infographic comes from both the Preliminary Budget made by the City Manager and the Submitted Activity Budget made by the Mayor. Earlier this month the Submitted Activity Budget Ordinance was introduced to the City Council and it will undergo consideration after the Public Hearings have finished up later this month. More on the process of passing a budget in the next post.
To interact with the infographic, simply hover your mouse over the bubble you’d like to see and it will give you the name of the department and the amount of funds the City Manager, Troy Shulte, and Mayor, Sly James, have deemed appropriate for the coming year before any changes have been made by City Council.

We were able to make this visualization of the Preliminary City Budget with the assistance of IBM’s Many Eyes dataset and visualization site.
In the next post we’ll look at the process of making and approving the Kansas City, Missouri budget.

Carrie Wade