What is Civic Ledger?

One of the Oregon Journalism Project's goals is to provide more transparency into how Oregon governments spend taxpayer dollars. It's a difficult task, because government budgeting is complicated and can be confusing. To help translate that complexity into useful information, we have created Civic Ledger, a data set that offers a look into government spending across the state.

We recruited public finance consultant Robert Winthrop to extract the most useful measure of government spending from audited financial reports. We've focused on more than a dozen jurisdictions including school districts, city governments and the state itself.

We used Claude AI to design and build this news application, but all the language on the website is from our journalists and the data has been fact-checked.

Watch this video to learn more about Civic Ledger:

Our Data:

For every fiscal year starting in 2016, we used Claude AI to extract the Total Primary Government expense line in the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) for each jurisdiction. The ACFR is a granular document published in a standard format by state, county, city, school district, and other government entities. We verified all the values and sources manually after extraction.

After consulting state and national municipal finance experts, we chose total primary expense as a yardstick for comparison because it is a single audited number that shows what a jurisdiction spent in a fiscal year. This is the only value consistently published by every level of government under the same accounting standard, making it comparable across jurisdictions.

The data helps us understand long-term spending trends and gives a point of entry into underlying financial statements. But this number doesn't show long-term liabilities, such as debt or pension obligations.

Users can select any jurisdiction to see how its spending changed over the past decade (both in percentage terms and in real dollars) and what it would have been if it had changed at the same pace as population and inflation. The “Compare” tab places different jurisdictions' spending side-by-side.

Over the coming weeks, reporters at OJP and our partners across the state will look into individual jurisdictions more closely to tell the story of what drove changes in revenue and spending.