Map | Historic Spending | Warrant Wizard Audio | Town Meeting 101 | Partners

There’s a LOT of information here. We’ve arranged the tables so that you can build your understanding gradually. As you go through, pay attention to whether a chart is showing dollars or percentages. Why? Percentages are good for showing the rate of change each year. But sometimes, you do better to look at the dollars. For example, if your town doubles its spending on a small budget item, like public health, it can look like a big increase as a percentage. But it still is only a few thousand dollars more and that’s not a heavy hit on the town budget.

We start with some percentage type charts. We have the broad brush of spending and revenues corrected for population and inflation. That means we have calculated the percent change on a per person basis, and have also removed the increases that could be due to the change in the overall cost of living from 2001 to 2007. The next two charts break out the spending and revenue changes by category, such as police and schools or local property tax and statewide property tax (not corrected for changes in population or inflation).

The next three charts are in dollars. We look at spending and revenue, but corrected for population and inflation. We give two more dollar charts that break out the spending and revenue categories -- without the population/inflation correction.

The final two charts give you the changes in spending and revenue categories as percentages, and this time, with the population/inflation correction.

If you want the complete data set, you can get it all in an Excel spreadsheet from the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies. NHCPPS deserves all the credit for pulling this information together from various public sources and we are grateful for their support of this project.

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