The numbers presented here are formulations developed by the Herald, based on the city budget. For a variety of reasons, it is different from the budget.
First, we eliminated a category called "transfer in." These are transfers among departments. For example, the utilities pay a fee to the police for protection and the police pay a fee to the utilities for water, sewage, garbage and similar services. The city budget essentially counts that twice, once when taxpayers pay the police and once more when the police pays the utilities.
Second, we eliminated funds that the city passes on directly to the airport authority, which is a jurisdiction separate from the city.
Hence, the city says its budget is $117.4 million, but we report it as $105.8 million.
In addition, the city budget is broken down into different funds spread among many departments. Public health, for example, gets money from state and federal grants in one fund and money from property taxes, sales taxes, licensing and others in another fund.
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We broke the budget down into general categories of services such that public health and social services, including funding for nonprofits, constitutes one line item.
Finally, because of the convoluted nature of the budget -- it's 402 pages long with hundreds of thousands of lines -- there was no way to precisely categorize every line item, so our numbers should be seen largely as somewhat rough estimates.
