On April 8, the City of Hyattsville released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. The next day, I started transcribing that budget into a Google sheet, an interactive tool for my neighbors to visualize how the city intends to spend its tax dollars this coming year.
My intention was to follow in the footsteps of the excellent work that Claire Panak Tombes did in tracking the city’s finances through her Substack blog, Route One Finance. Unfortunately, Claire stopped writing this March following her move out of Hyattsville, and unlike her, I am not an accountant.
What I do have is a background in computer programming and familiarity with her writing and the city’s budget documents, so I thought my skills and knowledge might be useful in continuing the push for accountability that she and others have started. While putting the spreadsheet together has been an interesting (and even fun) experience for me, it is not something that I should be doing.
If you’ve read Route One Finance, you’re probably familiar with some of the city’s financial woes: yearly operating deficits, massive debt tied to capital projects, cost overruns and delays on those projects, late audits, unusable cost-tracking software. These are issues that, left unaddressed, will cost the city more to serve residents at a time when we are increasingly unable to bear a large tax hike. They will also take some time to solve. However, there are smaller issues that the city could try to solve in the short term to make it easier for those watching the city’s finances to follow along.
The city doesn’t seem to have an official interactive guide to the budget like my spreadsheet, but it could develop one, and there’s precedent for something similar in the form of the city’s Community Profile dashboard. The city occasionally releases new quarterly financial reports to its website as unsearchable scans of printouts, but the city could instead upload the digital PDFs it already possesses. The city regularly underestimates the amount of tax revenue it expects to receive and overestimates expenditures, leading to budgeted deficits turning into surpluses by the end of the fiscal year. But the city could instead anticipate this based on past years’ trends, bringing budgeting accuracy to levels matching or exceeding those of our neighbors in cities such as College Park and Greenbelt.
To the city’s credit, there have been improvements in the last two years: This year’s budget book has tables detailing departmental spending, a breakdown of funding sources and fully selectable text — things that were missing from the FY 2025 budget book. The small steps above would build upon that progress.
There will be several city council meetings about the budget: May 11, 20 and 26; and June 8, when the final vote is expected. Our mayor and city councilmembers are fairly approachable, as you would expect in a smaller community like ours. Please go to those meetings, and tell them — neighbor to neighbor — to take the small steps for transparency, commit to the big steps for stability, and demonstrate the passion for good government that we expect to see from them.
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Mike Bonds is a resident of Hyattsville.
*The views expressed in this column belong to its author. The Life & Timesreserves the right to edit “From Where I Stand” submissions for brevity and clarity.