You might have heard that Draft Budget 2025 was tabled at City Council last week. While reading pages of City budget information might be interesting for some, others may prefer a more interactive approach to understanding where their money goes. That’s why the City created the Budget Explorer to help you get the information you need in a simpler way.
James Verreault, Program and Project Management Officer with Finance and Corporate Services and Paul Steeves, Senior Data Analytics Strategist with the City Manager’s Office, are two of the masterminds behind the Budget Explorer. They took the time to speak with us about how the Budget Explorer can help you understand Budget 2025.
Bringing Budget 2025 to life
The Budget Explorer breaks down Draft Budget 2025 in a clear, engaging, and interactive way. Instead of rows of tables and black and white text, the Budget Explorer uses illustrations and online features to bring the various parts of Budget 2025 to life.
“At a very basic level, the Budget Explorer provides kind of a helicopter view of the budget,” explains Paul. “It answers those basic questions like, how much money does the City have? How much are we spending in this upcoming budget? It presents this information in a way that’s front and center, instead of buried in an Excel spreadsheet.”
“The Budget Explorer does a really good job of breaking down the different components of the budget,” adds James. “It’s an extremely useful tool to help you understand what your taxes are going towards.”
“What we’re doing with the Budget Explorer is continuing to advance what we’ve heard from the Mayor and Council about having a more open and transparent budget process. We wanted to make sure that the budget process was less intimidating for the public and, ultimately, more engaging as a whole.”
A personalized user experience
There are endless ways to engage with the Budget Explorer to help you get the information that matters to you.
As James explains, “It’s almost like a choose your own adventure situation where you can decide how deep into certain areas you want to go versus others.”
“For instance, if housing solutions are something you are interested in, you could explore that in the service highlights, or maybe you want to know what the Community and Social Services Department’s budget is for 2025. You could look into that as well.”
For those who enjoy diving into data, the Budget Explorer enables you to access and download all the data sets that are used to power the visualizations.
“I think open data is great from a public transparency and engagement perspective,” notes Paul. “Hopefully this will lead to people contributing to things like planning and service improvements down the road.”
Understanding how Budget 2025 affects you
At the end of the day, both James and Paul hope the Budget Explorer will help you feel more familiar with our City budget.
“I hope the Budget Explorer helps people develop a better understanding of the budget and how it impacts where you work, live and play,” says Paul.
“I hope it gives people a greater comfort in providing feedback to City standing committees and Councillors on the issues that might be important to them and the budget process as a whole,” adds James.
To learn more about the Budget, how to get involved and the Budget Explorer, visit ottawa.ca.
For more information on City programs and services, visit ottawa.ca, call 3-1-1 (TTY: 613-580-2401) or 613-580-2400 to contact the City using Canada Video Relay Service. You can also connect with us through Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.