Ann Arbor police service calls for Jan. 3, 2010. This map was built by The Chronicle in about 15 minutes using data from the city's online catalog. (Image links to fully interactive map hosted at http://www.batchgeocode.com)

At the same meeting, the budget committee also continued its discussion about the content of the monthly financial reports that the city charter requires the city administrator to provide to the council.

What ties these issues together is the idea that there’s information the city will be routinely pushing out, without anyone needing to make a special request for it.

In the case of the data catalog, it appears at first glance that the project is a kind of bonus for the citizens of Ann Arbor. That is, it could be thought of as something the city is not required by law to do, but which it’s doing anyway in the interest of transparent government.

That’s different from the monthly financial statement, which the charter explicitly requires. That issue came to the surface during the budget committee meeting, during a verbal exchange between Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) and the city’s chief financial officer, Tom Crawford. The exchange found Taylor appealing to an English word only rarely deployed as a verb: “I guess I’d stickle.”

On Stickling

CFO Tom Crawford is required by the city charter to provide to the council a monthly statement via the city administrator, Roger Fraser:

SECTION 5.6. The Controller shall be the chief accounting officer of the City. The Controller shall:

(6) Submit to the Council, through the City Administrator, by the tenth working day of each month, a statement showing the balances at the close of the preceding month, in all funds and budget items, the amount of the City’s known liabilities and budget items to which the same are to be charged, and all other information necessary to show the City’s financial condition;

After a period during which the city council apparently did not expect such a monthly report, the council’s budget committee has now begun to talk about what information should be contained in the monthly financial statement.

At the Feb. 16 budget committee meeting, Crawford said that he’d provided to councilmembers in that month’s statement the information that he interpreted the charter to require. It included encumbrances – funds that are committed for a specific use. But Crawford suggested not including encumbrances in future statements. In context it was clear that the concern was based on clean formatting and readability of the document, not a desire to shield that information from the public.

Christopher Taylor (Ward 3), however, wanted to know on what basis that information could be stricken from the monthly statement. Hadn’t Crawford just told the committee that he interpreted the charter to require its inclusion? Crawford suggested that the content of the report could reflect a consensus from council about what they wanted to see in the report: “It depends on how much of a stickler you’ll be.”

And at that, Taylor allowed: “I guess I’d stickle.” And Taylor is right to stickle. As I wrote in a previous  column on the city charter:

That is, the city council cannot waive a charter requirement. And any citizen has legal standing to file suit on a charter violation to demand relief.

The ensuing discussion among the budget committee touched on the idea that the monthly statements would be made available online. Perhaps formatting and readability issues could be addressed through linking to a separate document – as opposed to embedding the information on encumbrances directly in a document.

That seems like a practical approach to take: Focus on providing the information underpinning the statement, not so much on the formatting of the statement document. Can the statement “show” the encumbrances, if there is only a link from the statement to a separate document containing the encumbrances? Probably so – that’s the kind of issue the council can work out with city staff.

But it’s not up to city staff and the council to agree to strike the encumbrances from the set of information that’s required by the charter to be provided.

Data Catalog: Records and the City Charter

At the Feb. 16 meeting, the budget committee agreed that once they are satisfied with the format of the monthly statement, the statement will be conveyed directly to councilmembers, without intermediation by the committee. Conveying it to the council – and the public – by posting it online would be a good approach.

It’s a good approach because it would easily satisfy a charter requirement that all city records, like the monthly financial statement, be public:

City Records to be Public
SECTION 18.2. All records of the City shall be public, shall be kept in City offices except when required for official reasons or for purposes of safekeeping to be elsewhere, and shall be available for inspection at all reasonable times. No person shall dispose of, mutilate, or destroy any record of the City, except as provided by law, and any person who shall do so contrary to law shall be guilty of a violation of this charter.

Of course, the city could also be compelled to produce those monthly financial statements under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to anyone who asks.

By posting the monthly financial statements online, the city reduces the resources that would otherwise be required to respond to requests under the FOIA, or the city charter, that those records be produced.

The same principle applies to the information the city is providing as part of its new data catalog.

Last month, the city council’s budget committee had been told the data catalog would be coming online soon.  [Chronicle coverage: "Ann Arbor's Budget Data to Go Online"] So last week’s implementation of this first draft of the data catalog – which contains much more than just financial transactional data – was expected and welcome news. In addition to financial data, for example, the catalog also contains mapping data and public safety information.

Washtenaw County government is moving toward a similar goal. Commissioners discussed their “transparency of government initiative” at a Feb. 18 working session.

The city’s data catalog is a tremendous stride forward for transparency of our local government – but it should not be analyzed as an “extra” or a “bonus” for citizens. The FOIA requires that city documents – with few exceptions – be produced on request. And independently of the FOIA, the city charter requires that city records be available for inspection at all reasonable times.

By providing availability 24/7 on the Internet, the city would certainly cover “all reasonable times.”

The data catalog, then, should be seen as a way for the city to use technology efficiently to respond globally to potential requests for access to information under the FOIA or the city charter – which citizens could already legally demand on an individual basis.

As the city looks to add to the data catalog, then, one guiding question should be: Is this information record required to be public under the charter or the FOIA? If the answer is yes, then the information is a candidate for inclusion in the data catalog. Otherwise put, everything is fair game for inclusion in the data catalog.

Is there any reason why some city records shouldn’t be prioritized for inclusion in the data catalog? Absolutely. Those data sets that would require intensive ongoing staff resources for production of the data should be a lower priority.

As head of the city’s information technology, Dan Rainey, told the budget committee on Feb. 16, the data sets that are included in this initial phase are those that can be produced in automated fashion. They’ll be on a production schedule, with no human intervention required beyond the initial setup.

Data versus Records/Reports

What’s included in the data catalog are data sets, not reports/records. The idea is that by providing information in a relatively raw state, individuals – citizens or councilmembers – who are interested in building their own reports can do so fairly easily, without introducing an additional burden to city staff.

Kevin Eyer, senior applications specialists in the IT department with the city of Ann Arbor, gives the city council budget committee a quick tour through the data catalog. (Photo by the writer.)

For example, the city’s data catalog includes a comma-delimited file containing police service calls. There are data fields for date, location, type of call, and the street address.

Why don’t they provide that data presented as a map? It’s partly because you can make your own map out of the data, if you need a map. Besides, whatever kind of map the city might create, there will always be someone who’d prefer a different kind of map – maybe someone  wants to see the police calls for a specific day, like Jan. 3, 2010.

That’s what I wanted – for demonstration purposes – so I took the city’s data, and headed over to http://www.batchgeocode.com and within about 15 minutes generated the map shown at the top of this column. A few tips on preparing the police call data for mapping at batchgeocode.com:

• Add columns for city and state and fill each cell with “Ann Arbor” and “MI,” respectively
• In the street address field, replace the word “block” with a blank – the city provides the address information by block, not the specific address.
• In the street address field, insert spaces around the “&” for addresses specified by intersection.
• The batchgeocode.com process takes whatever column you name “group” and assigns the colors of the map push pins based on that. Clicking on the pushpins in the map legend causes just those color push pins to appear.
• Read through the documentation at batchgeocode.com
• If you’ve never done this before, it’ll take longer than 15 minutes.

It’s not that the city doesn’t like maps, though. Among the data sets in the catalog are various KML files that open in Google Earth. For example, there’s a perfectly drawn map of Ann Arbor’s city boundaries, which can be used as a layer in other maps that people might be interested in creating.

The demonstration of the data catalog at the budget committee meeting prompted an exclamation from Marcia Higgins (Ward 4): “It seems really user friendly!”

It is.

But the city will be looking for feedback on the data catalog – the email address DataCatalog@A2gov.org is one way to do that. And as Chronicle readers provide that feedback, I’d encourage you to bear in mind the difference between data and reports – as well as the idea that the data catalog provides information that could legally already be demanded from the city.

Dave Askins is editor of the Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Posting of the budget committee's Tuesday meeting.

At a meeting of the Ann Arbor city council’s budget committee, the city’s chief financial officer, Tom Crawford, sketched a plan to start making available a wide range of raw data from the city, starting with numbers from the finance department. Crawford said he hopes to have a pilot in place by the end of February.

Budget committee members also discussed what the contents of a monthly statement should be that will now be provided to the committee and to the council as a body – such a report is required by the city’s charter.

The other main point addressed by the budget committee was raised by city administrator Roger Fraser, who suggested to councilmembers that they owed it to the community to put the question of a city income tax before the voters. Fraser said they had a responsibility to float the question, regardless of what their personal feelings were on the issue.

The meeting was also attended by Mayor John Hieftje, who is a member of the city council, but no longer part of the 5-member budget committee – the council reorganized its committee structure at its Dec. 21, 2009 meeting. Hieftje participated in deliberations on the question of when a city income tax ballot question might feasibly go on the ballot.

Data Catalog

The city’s chief financial officer, Tom Crawford, put the posting of the city’s financial data online in the context of a broader initiative – modeled on Washington D.C.’s data catalog – to make available basic data on the city’s website. The idea is that other interested parties might use the data to create reports and analyses that the city staff might not think to create, or simply not have the time and resources to create.

Crawford reassured councilmembers that the data could not be altered and then re-posted to the city’s website by the public. Addressing the issue that someone could alter the data, then disseminate in by some other means, Crawford cited the experience of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority in developing a disclaimer that is included with the provision of its realtime parking data. [That disclaimer reads: "The DDA is not responsible for third party use of this data." For some background on the realtime parking data kerfuffle leading to that disclaimer, see "Plus, Data Access Talk"]

The first kind of data that would be posted as a part of the city’s data catalog, Crawford said, would be data from his own department. As a pilot, the data would be provided as comma-separated value (CSV) files, together with documentation summarizing what was contained in the data set, a contact person within the city, a statement addressing accuracy, and a list of field names.

Also included for each group of data would be one of the standard kind of reports that can be run from the data, Crawford explained. These sample reports could range from hundreds to thousands of pages, he said. [They will not be printed out.] Examples of the kinds of data that would be available are journal entries, P-card transactions, the check register, the aging report (people who owe the city money), and the investment report.

The move towards providing the financial data as a part of the data catalog comes in advance of deployment of new financial software, which the city council authorized purchase of at its Dec. 7, 2009 meeting. The new software will cost around $900,000, with a payback through savings realized in a little under three years. One of the benefits touted for the new software is the ability to generate a variety of different reports by a broader range of users, and with less effort.

Even using the old software, however, Crawford said the idea was to post the data in a way that involved “minimal human effort.” This came in response to a concern expressed by Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) about the burden it would place on city staff.

The question of city staff burden arose at a couple of points during the meeting. City administrator Roger Fraser responded to councilmember concerns that they were placing an undue burden on staff. He said that, yes, there’d been an uptick in council requests for reports and data – but that was understandable given the current budget climate and that city staff accepted that as a part of their job.

Monthly Report

The budget committee also discussed what the contents of the monthly report should be, which will now be provided to the council. A monthly financial statement is required under the city’s charter:

SECTION 5.6. The Controller shall be the chief accounting officer of the City. The Controller shall:

(6) Submit to the Council, through the City Administrator, by the tenth working day of each month, a statement showing the balances at the close of the preceding month, in all funds and budget items, the amount of the City’s known liabilities and budget items to which the same are to be charged, and all other information necessary to show the City’s financial condition;

Tom Crawford, the city’s CFO, reported that he and his staff had looked at the charter and come up with a report that they thought met the definition as described in the city charter.

One of the elements of that report will be a report of the general fund’s revenues and expenditures. Crawford cautioned that the year-to-date percentages would not necessarily match the percentage of time that has passed to date in the fiscal year – it’s not linear. For example, now halfway through the fiscal year, most of the taxes were collected – but that’s a function of when taxes are collected, at the beginning of the year. Or halfway through the year, revenues from licensing and inspections in the building department are more than 50% of the year’s budgeted amount – but that actually translates into a projected shortfall.

Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) asked if the comparative year-to-date percentages could be included in the monthly report, just to orient councilmembers to the possible significance of the percentages. For example, 20% could either be awesome, Taylor said, or it could also mean that “the sky is falling.”

In discussing how the monthly report should be disseminated, Roger Fraser suggested that it be sent directly to all councilmembers. However, Marcia Higgins (Ward 4) weighed in in favor of first having the budget committee review it before disseminating it to other councilmembers. She reasoned that the rest of the council might not understand what they were looking at, and that budget committee members would then be in a position to help others on council.

Sabra Briere (Ward 1) said that she preferred to “err on the side of everybody-sees-it.” Crawford said that it could be posted on the website. Taylor suggested that if the report changed after review and questions by council, then it could be held until a final version was determined.

City Income Tax

City administrator Roger Fraser told the budget committee that revenue was not one of the items on the list of issues staff had been given to consider in preparation for the council’s Jan. 26 budget workshop [starting at 6 p.m. in city council chambers]. But on the question of a city income tax, Fraser said, “We owe it to the community to have that question out there.” He suggested that it be put before the voters either at the August 2010 primary election or the November 2010 general election.

Mayor John Hieftje would subsequently point out that choosing the primary versus the general election would not affect how soon the tax could be implemented.

When there seemed to be little enthusiasm in the room for the idea of floating a ballot question for voters on the implementation of a city income tax, Fraser pressed the point. He suggested that they spend a little bit of money to have a survey of voter attitudes done – similar to what the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority had undertaken recently to measure attitudes about a countywide transportation millage. He called undertaking such a survey “due diligence.”

Stephen Rapundalo (Ward 2) wondered if there was a good enough set of information out in the public for a survey to be meaningful – we might want to try to educate first and then survey voters. One specific example cited by Rapundalo was that many people are under the erroneous impression that an income tax would be implemented on top of a property tax for general operating expenses. [The city charter forces a choice between a property tax or an income tax – it's not possible to have both for general operating expenses. That said, there would still be other property taxes collected – for transportation, solid waste, and schools, for example.]

There was some sentiment expressed in the room that people essentially calculated whether their individual taxes would go up or down and decided their vote based on that.

Fraser responded that a properly designed survey would actually find out what it is that voters understand about the issue. He allowed that when the results of the survey came back, the council might well decide that there was no point in putting it on the ballot.

Quorum and Open Meetings Issues

The five-member budget committee as determined by a city council resolution at its Dec. 21, 2009 meeting consists of  Mike Anglin (Ward 5), Marcia Higgins (Ward 4), Christopher Taylor (Ward 3), Stephen Rapundalo (Ward 2) and Sabra Briere (Ward 1). Prior to that resolution, the council had combined its budget committee with its labor committee. Now, the labor committee is combined with the council administration committee.

At one of the spring 2009 Sunday night city council caucus meetings, Higgins had rejected the idea that other councilmembers should attend the budget committee’s meetings, citing the possibility that a quorum could be reached, with implications about whether any decisions made would become decisions of the council as a body as opposed to decisions of the budget committee.

The attendance on Tuesday of all five members of the budget committee, plus the mayor as an additional member of the council, constituted a quorum of councilmembers. The meeting was not social in nature and thus met the standard for definition of a meeting under Michigan Open Meetings Act.

Notice of Tuesday’s meeting of the budget committee was properly posted in the lobby of city hall; however, the notice did not include mention of the possibility that a quorum of councilmembers could be present.

The Open Meetings Act requires that minutes be recorded for the meeting – in the “action minutes” style used by the council, this would amount to a list of topics addressed as posted in the meeting notice, names of attendees, date and time of the meeting. Councilmembers present at the budget committee meeting did not vote on any resolutions.

On Monday evening, city staff met with 80-100 residents in the auditorium of Slauson Middle School. Kerry Gray, coordinator for urban forestry and natural resources planning, was on hand to clarify that an initiative to develop an urban forest management plan – Gray’s main goal in the coming year – had been accelerated. Instead of beginning the public process in the fall, Monday’s meeting was effectively the kickoff to a public engagement process on developing a tree management plan for the city.

Our goal with this brief article is not to explicate the back-and-forth among residents and staff at Monday’s meeting, but rather to share some data.

Back in the spring we’d noticed the city’s tree inventory in progress. On Monday evening at Slauson, some of the results of that inventory were presented in summary form (e.g., almost 40% of the city’s trees are some kind of maple).

But in light of some recent local discussion about access to raw data, we’d looked forward to the completion of the tree inventory by Davey Resource Group, anticipating a rich data set that could serve as inspiration for anyone with the technical know-how to make use of it. It includes the location of each tree, as well as type, condition and size.

We asked the city of Ann Arbor for all the electronic deliverables from Davey. And we provide the following data with a caveat: On Monday evening, city staff stressed that they were still doing some quality control work on the initial data set – so the data provided to The Chronicle is a snapshot of the city’s trees as assessed by the Davey Resource Group. The city’s inventory will presumably be maintained as a frequently updated data set that changes as trees are pruned, removed, or planted.

• Tree Inventory Analysis Report – includes executive summary.
• Tree Inventory CSV Data – the original data set was in MS EXCEL format. Saved to CSV saves a few MB, but even so, it’s a large (15MB) file.
• Report Spreadsheet – summary data associated with the analysis report.
• GeoDatabase Zipfile – the coordinates in the CSV file don’t look like GPS coordinates, but presumably the multiple files contained in the GeoDatabase provide some sort of relational structure?