A Comparison of Two Municipal Budgets

Red-meat material for bean-counters

News is just a mite slow in Emerald City this morning, so we thought we'd set up an open topic thread. This is something we haven't done on Weber County Forum for quite some time; so today we'll let our gentle readers drive the discussion.

As a prelude to that, however, we'll highlight a couple a couple of northern Utah print media articles which report on a common topic, i.e., 2008 municipal budgets.

The first, from this morning's Standard-Examiner, reports on the 2008 Emerald City budget, which was approved at last night's council session:

Ogden approves $107M budget

The second, this morning's Deseret News article, discusses Salt Lake City's newly approved 2008 budget:

Salt Lake City Council adopts $202 million budget.

Being the curious type, we googled population data and did a few quick calculations. Using assumed population figures for Salt Lake City and Emerald City of 182,000 and 78,000 respectively, we find that Salt Lake City operates roughly 20% more efficiently than we.

Significantly, we think, the Salt Lake City budget provides for the hiring of six new firefighters and ten new police officers. And we can't fail to note that we don't hear Salt Lake City citizens griping about dirty culinary water. And while we recognize that our neighbor down south may benefit from some economies of scale which are unique to a more populous city, we don't know whether this accounts for what we think to be an apparent inefficiency gap.

These articles, both published this morning, cry out for our gentle readers' comparative analysis, we think.

Please feel free to dive in with your own comparisons... or... talk about whatever you want to talk about.

Before we turn the floor over, however, we'll also attend to a housekeeping matter. We received one reader report this morning that our blog comment pop-up window has been malfunctioning since late last night. If any other readers are having the same problem, we'd appreciate your notifying us via the "contact" link in the upper-right sidebar.

Take it away, folks!