Hi All!
I wanted to share my first project built with Framework:
It’s a site that aims to make exploring Massachusetts town data easy and interesting. I would love to hear your thoughts on this first draft. One concern I have is the site’s not optimized for mobile.
Andrew
It looks pretty good on mobile to me! Whether you designed it that way intentionally or not, Framework projects using built in constructs (like cards and the grid system) with the default styling should work well on mobile.
And, I love your locovote favicon! 
Thank you!! 
Thanks for sharing this! Maybe this is obvious to people from Massachusetts, but why does it list expenditures from 2022 and revenues from 2023? I would have expected to want to compare revenue and expenses in the same year, or maybe revenue in one year with expenses the next year.
Good question!
Short answer it was the data I could get easily.
Longer answer: I download the data as spreadsheets from the Division of Local Services Municipal Databank:
https://dlsgateway.dor.state.ma.us/reports/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=Community_Comparison_Report
Initially, I was interested in looking at budget surpluses/deficits but when I tried with the data above every town had big surpluses. Looking at the Community Snapshot Report here:
https://dlsgateway.dor.state.ma.us/reports/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=CommunityPage
it was clear that revenues were for FY2023 and expenditures were for FY2022 so it made sense that I was seeing revenues bigger than expenditures. I got in touch with the Data Analytics and Resources Bureau and they pointed me to this historical data:
(link omitted because I’m limited to two links)
Unfortunately that data doesn’t have taxes broken up by source (I care about how much comes from residential versus other). I was able to get the historical data to line up better, but I couldn’t get it perfect. As a workaround I’ve been focusing on how much each town spent on “Debt Service” in FY2022.
I think the towns might know their revenue numbers earlier in the fiscal year. Looking at the FY2023 expenditure data I noticed a few towns didn’t have data yet (all zeros). This is just a guess though.
omitted link if anyone wants it: https://dlsgateway.dor.state.ma.us/reports/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=ScheduleA.GeneralFund