Case Study: City of Redmond achieves transparent, narrative-driven budgeting with Socrata

Open Budget Redmond: Telling the Unique Story of a City Budget

The City of Redmond, Washington needed a way to publish its narrative, priority-driven two-year budget so citizens could explore and understand the context behind the numbers. PDFs preserved the story but weren’t searchable or drillable, and the city’s open data portal couldn’t ingest the budget in a useful way; building a custom site would have been costly and time-consuming.

Redmond implemented Socrata’s Open Budget app, which was reconfigured to match its unique priority-based, biennial budgeting and preserve explanatory text alongside the data. The result: interactive visualizations and self-serve access that save staff time, improve transparency for residents and council members, and make it easier to benchmark Redmond’s spending against other jurisdictions.

City of Redmond

Malisa Files

Deputy Finance Director