Michigan city launches digital hub for budget transparency and planning
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A new engagement platform aims to help officials in Rochester Hills better invest public dollars into what taxpayers want, one official says.
Like many cities in the U.S., Rochester Hills, Michigan, often struggles to make enough time and money available to city leaders to accomplish their policy and program goals. But a new financial data management platform aims to help city officials more efficiently plan for the city’s budget based on resident feedback and engagement.
The Michigan suburb about 30 miles north of Detroit is home to nearly 80,000 people and is operating on a $223.3 million budget through 2028, according to the city’s budget plan report. In its entirety, the report contains 366 pages that detail how city funds are divided across public works projects, police and fire departments, infrastructure plans, staffing needs and other services.
“The art is allocating those dollars efficiently and administering them effectively,” Joe Snyder, the city’s chief financial officer, told Route Fifty. But “there are two things that no one has enough of: time and money. There are way more demands than we have money for, and I wish we had more time to do these things.”
“That’s the magic of budgeting,” Snyder said. “I only have one pie to work with, and [I’m] slicing up the pie appropriately to deliver the services that the residents want.”
To help city leaders better understand where to effectively invest taxpayer dollars, Rochester Hills launched a digital hub where people can interact with data visualizations of the city’s budget plan and submit feedback to city leadership.
Residents can, for instance, monitor the progress of capital improvement projects in real time and use an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot to ask more specific or personally interesting questions about the annual budget, Snyder said. Staff can also deploy polls or questionnaires through the site that prompt residents to share their thoughts about the city’s use of money.
Historically, the primary way people learned about the city’s budget was to sift through the 300-page document, and they had rare opportunities to share their feedback or input with city officials unless they attended an annual budget workshop or public hearing, Snyder explained.
The financial engagement platform, developed by the planning and budgeting solutions provider ClearGov, also uses AI to summarize residents’ responses to surveys that officials can use to inform future investments and budget planning, he said.
According to the city’s website, 149 comments and responses have been submitted since the platform launched.
In fact, early results show emerging trends in resident sentiment analyses, Snyder said. Community members have shown a particular interest in the construction and enhancement of connected pathways, such as trails that connect schools, parks and other sites, across the city.
“Pathways were not a priority for the city, and we didn’t realize how popular they were among residents,” Snyder said. But now with those data insights, decision-makers can target investments more proactively, instead of having to wait until designated budget meetings with the public.
When city staff can collect resident input sooner and more frequently throughout the year, it makes the whole budget process “go that much easier,” Snyder said, and “it just makes us much more transparent.”
The digital hub can offer residents evidence that the city is working on and investing in the priorities that they voice, which “reaffirms that we’re doing a pretty good job,” he explained. “We can keep reinvesting in something that we know our residents really enjoy.”