About this project

What this project is

The City of Keene's fiscal year 2027 operating budget is 268 pages long. It covers $57 million in General Fund spending, seven other funds totaling $28.2 million, a seven-year capital improvement program, and the debt obligations behind all of it. This site makes that data accessible to residents who want to understand it but don't have the time or training to read the full document.

The site is exploratory, not predictive. It presents the City's own data, explains what needs explaining, and surfaces the questions the budget raises but doesn't answer. It does not tell residents what to conclude about whether spending is too high or too low, whether any particular policy is good or bad, or whether any Council decision was correct. Those judgments belong to residents.

This is not a replacement for the City's official budget documents. It is a navigation tool that helps residents find what they're looking for and trace every figure back to the source. It is not an advocacy tool, a forecast, or a platform for criticism of City staff or elected officials.

Who built it

My name is Daniel Maynard-Wyzik. I'm a Keene resident. I built this because I wanted to understand the City's budget and found the 268-page PDF difficult to navigate. The site started as a personal project to make the data more accessible, and I decided to publish it because other residents might find it useful too.

This project is independent. It is not affiliated with the City of Keene, any political campaign, or any advocacy organization. Hosting costs are minimal and paid personally. No one funds this project.

If you have questions, corrections, or feedback: dan.wyzik@gmail.com.

How the data was assembled

Every number on this site comes from one source: the City of Keene's published FY27 Operating Budget. The budget is a public document produced by the City Manager's office and presented to the City Council for adoption.

The data was extracted from the budget PDF into structured data files — JSON tables of revenue and expenditure line items, bond schedules, capital projects, and fund summaries. Each extraction was validated by reconstructing the budget's own totals. The General Fund's FY27 City Manager Recommended total of $57,011,251 was the primary reconciliation check; every category subtotal was verified against the published figures. The same validation was applied to each of the seven other funds.

Every page on the site cites the specific pages of the budget it draws from. The intent is that any reader can pick up the City's document, turn to the cited pages, and verify what the site reports. The site amplifies the City's data; it does not replace it.

This project is built with the assistance of AI tools, including Claude and Claude Code, both from Anthropic. AI assists with prose drafting, code generation, and data extraction. Every page on the site has been reviewed by the human maintainer before publication. The use of AI tools is disclosed here because transparency about methods is part of the project's commitment to trustworthiness.

What this site does not cover

The site covers the City of Keene's FY27 operating budget. Several things that affect residents' tax bills and public services are outside its scope:

These boundaries are deliberate. The site covers what it can verify from a single source document. Expanding to school district, county, or multi-year historical data would introduce sourcing and methodology questions the project is not yet equipped to handle.

Known limitations and discrepancies

Every project has limitations. Disclosing them is how the site earns trust rather than assuming it.

Airport recovery ratio

The airport's revenue-to-expenditure ratio can be calculated two ways from the budget. The line-item figures on the revenue and expenditure pages yield a recovery ratio of 65.6% ($592,200 in revenue / $902,992 in expenditure). The airport's own performance metrics table reports 74.14%. The site displays the line-item-derived figure (65.6%) because it reconciles to the budget's other totals. The discrepancy is unresolved — the metrics table figure may reflect a different methodology or exclude certain cost categories, but the budget does not explain the difference.

Rounding in actual-year data

For the two actual years (FY24 and FY25), the sum of individual revenue and expenditure line items does not exactly match the budget's printed subtotals. The differences are $1–4 per category, consistent with sub-dollar rounding in the City's accounting system. The site preserves the individual line-item values as printed and does not adjust them to force reconciliation. Budget-year and recommended figures match exactly.

Tax rate component rounding

The four tax rate components for FY27 ($14.52 + $18.07 + $1.59 + $3.35) sum to $37.53, one cent less than the budget's published total of $37.54. This is a rounding artifact — the underlying rates carry more precision than two decimal places. The site uses the budget's published totals and rates directly, not recomputed values.

Fiscal Policies appendix

The FY27 budget's Fiscal Policies appendix (pages 247–257) was not fully text-extractable from the PDF. Where these policies are referenced on the site (debt service ceiling, fund balance targets), the references draw on the extractable portions and the budget's own narrative summaries. The City's published budget document remains the authoritative source for the full policy text.

City Manager Recommended vs. adopted budget

The site presents the City Manager's Recommended figures as the default throughout. These are the figures the Council acts on during budget deliberations. The actual adopted budget may differ if the Council makes amendments. When the FY27 budget is formally adopted, any changes from the CM-recommended version will be reflected in updates to the site, with an explicit note about what changed.

Accessibility

The site has not been reviewed against WCAG accessibility standards. Tables use semantic HTML and scope attributes, all charts have aria labels, and the color palette was chosen with contrast ratios in mind, but a formal accessibility audit has not been conducted. This is a known gap that will be addressed post-launch.

Errors and corrections

If you find an error — a number that doesn't match the budget, a calculation that's wrong, a source citation that's off — please report it to dan.wyzik@gmail.com.

When an error is reported, the maintainer reviews the report against the source document, fixes the error if confirmed, and posts a note in the corrections log below. The goal is to fix confirmed errors within 48 hours of report.

Corrections log

No corrections have been issued. This log will be updated if errors are identified and fixed.

What's coming later

The current site is the discovery layer — it presents the budget's data and surfaces questions. A scenario-modeling layer is planned for Phase 2, which will let residents explore questions like: How many years of fund balance remain at the current draw rate? What happens to debt service as new bonds are issued? What tax rate increase would close the structural gap?

Phase 2 will be built carefully. The modeling math will be reviewed by the City's Finance Director before publication, because scenario tools that produce wrong numbers are worse than no tool at all. The timeline is months from launch, not weeks.

Source links

[Decision pending: whether to make the project's source code repository public. See recommendation below the source links.]

Explore the budget