Public money deserves public scrutiny.

We read the budgets no one else is reading — and publish what deserves a question. Independent, cited, and free.

⅓

of US counties have no local newspaper

papers closing every week for a decade

200

average pages in a municipal budget

cost to read our reports

The Problem

Your budget is public. Nobody reads it.

Every year your town collects property taxes, sales taxes, and fees — and spends them on roads, schools, police, parks, contracts, and salaries. That spending is public record. It's your money, and the law says you have a right to see how it's used.

But "public record" usually means a 200-page PDF buried on a government website, written in accounting language, with no context and no one to explain it. Most people never see it. Most people don't know it exists.

A third of American counties have no local newspaper anymore. The reporters who used to read every budget document and ask why the parks department line item doubled — they're gone. Budget Watch fills that gap.

"More than two newspapers close every week in America — leaving nobody to ask where the money goes."

The local accountability gap

✓ What we do

Obtain official published budget documents from town government websites
Run structured 10-section analysis comparing year-over-year trends
Benchmark per-capita spending against peer towns of similar size
Flag line items that deviate significantly from expected patterns
Publish every finding with a page citation from the source document
Frame every flag as a neutral question — not an accusation

✕ What we don't do

Call anything corruption or accuse anyone of wrongdoing
Invent or estimate figures — every number is cited to the source
Call our work an "audit" — we are analysts, not auditors
Editorialize — we let the numbers speak and let the public ask
Accept funding from government sources or interested parties
Cover towns without a publicly available budget document

Our Methodology

Five checks, every report

Year-over-year spikes

Categories that grew more than 20% in a single year get flagged for review and explanation.

Peer-spending outliers

Per-capita figures more than 50% above comparable towns of similar size and region are flagged.

Fund balance erosion

Reserves declining two or more years in a row signal a structural budget problem worth examining.

Reserves vs. service cuts

Towns holding large reserves while cutting public services raise questions worth asking publicly.

Unexplained transfers

Inter-fund movements above a threshold without clear documented reason are flagged for transparency.

Every threshold is editorial judgment and every threshold is published. You can read the exact logic in our public repository. We hold ourselves to the same transparency we ask of others.

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Read a report

See exactly what our analysis looks like — every figure cited, every flag framed as a question.

Browse reports →

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Become an analyst

Detail-oriented and comfortable with spreadsheets? Help us expand coverage to more towns.

Apply now →

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Challenge our work

Think we misread a figure or missed an obvious explanation? We'll correct the record publicly.