Send a Message to the City of London Requesting more Data on the Police Budget

[DavemanCosman]

There is no Police Budget file in the City of London Website. We want to request this information from the city in the same format as the other files so that we can include it with our dashboard.

TODO

• Send a message to the City of London
• Please ask for assistance if you need more details

[jenSadler]

I sent the message below to the city of london (budget@london.ca). I will update this issue when/if I hear back from them:

I'd like to request some information from your office. I noticed that on the city of london budget website all of the business plans are listed in the same format except for:

london police services
land ambulance

The listed business plans just link to sites with no budget information, and they don't include important information such as:

Gross Operating Expenditures
Other Revenues
Net Tax Levy Supported Operating Budget
Total Capital Expenditures
Full-Time Equivalents (FTE’s) 

Could you please provide this information for these two services?

Thanks, -Jen Sadler

[jenSadler]

Hello Jennifer,

Thank you for reaching out. You are correct in your observation - noting the two which do not have a business plan that follows the format as the others posted.

London Police Services is a separate Board and Commission and does not prepare a business plan in the posted format. As such, we link to their direct webpage for any of their business and strategic plans. Any additional information you hope to obtain would have to be requested directly with London Police Services.

Land Ambulance is a purchased service through agreement with the Middlesex-London Paramedic Service. Similarly, as London Police Services, they do not prepare a business plan that follows the posted format. Any additional information you hope to obtain would have to be requested directly with the paramedic service. Additionally, the City’s budget for this service represents its portion of the billed costs and hence does not include much detail or breakdown of the agency as a whole.

One item that may be helpful and contains some of the information you are looking for is the City’s mulit-year budget document. It can be accessed at the following link - 2024 to 2027 Multi-Year Budget, Adopted March 1, 2024. We would draw your attention to the following in the document – Appendix A and Appendix B. London Police Services will be found under Protective Services while Land Ambulance would be found under Housing, Social and Health Services. We hope this is helpful.

Best,

Image Budget Financial Planning & Policy Finance Supports City of London

300 Dufferin Ave, London, ON, N6A 4L9 P: 519.661.4638 budget@london.ca | www.london.ca

[DavemanCosman]

On the Multiyear budget that they linked, I did find this information on page 169, Protective Services. -> 2024 to 2027 Multi-Year Budget, Adopted March 1, 2024.

Protective Services Operating Budget	2023 Budget	2024 Budget	2025 Budget	2026 Budget	2027 Budget	Avg. $ Increase/Decrease	Avg. % Increase/Decrease
London Police Services
Expenditure	141,478	171,289	187,697	197,294	212,915	17,859	10.9%
Non-Tax Levy Revenue	10,048	10,448	9,734	9,411	9,420	-157	-1.5%
Tax Levy Revenue	131,431	160,841	177,964	187,884	203,496	18,016	11.7%

Numbers are in the Thousands

[DavemanCosman]

There's some Business cases too under "London Police Service" (search that in the PDF)

Also to put the link here, the website to their Strategic plan and of their 2019 - 2023 Business plan (which I guess would be outdated at this point) https://www.londonpolice.ca/en/about/Business-Plans.aspx

[jenSadler]

Sent this message to Imran: Hi Imran,

We are just finishing up with civic tech club, and we're stuck on something that you might be able to help us with. I'm wondering if you might be able to take a look.

Our issue is that for the london police services we only have data in the format:

Protective Services Operating Budget	2023 Budget	2024 Budget	2025 Budget	2026 Budget	2027 Budget	Avg. $ Increase/Decrease	Avg. % Increase/Decrease
London Police Services
Expenditure	141,478	171,289	187,697	197,294	212,915	17,859	10.9%
Non-Tax Levy Revenue	10,048	10,448	9,734	9,411	9,420	-157	-1.5%
Tax Levy Revenue	131,431	160,841	177,964	187,884	203,496	18,016	11.7%

(https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2024-05/2024-2027%20Multi-Year%20Budget.pdf page 171)

whereas for everything else we have data in the format seen on page 2 of this pdf:

https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2024-05/Animal%20Services%20Secured.pdf

Honestly, except for FTEs I'm not sure what exactly these categories mean:

Gross Operating Expenditures
Other Revenues
Net Tax Levy Supported Operating Budget
Total Capital Expenditures
Full-Time Equivalents (FTE’s)

I'm not sure how to reconcile the two. You have a better financial mind than I do, do you see any way to get the data from the police services into the format for all of the other business plans?

If you feel like a challenge, take a look, no worries if you're not interested tho.

• Jen

[jenSadler]

From Imran:

For the meanings:

Gross Operating Expenditures -> total cost
Other Revenues -> non-tax revenue
Net Tax Levy Supported Operating Budget -> tax revenue
Total Capital Expenditures -> amount spent on (tangible) capital items. These are items like property, plant, and equipment which are typically high dollar value and their use spans over several years. They are "captialized" instead of the whole cost being expensed in one year, and their cost is amortized in a systematic way across their expected useful life.

From what I can see at a very high level, the line items disclose the total expenses for that service, then show some non-tax revenue (other revenue), then show how much of that budget is supported by tax dollars. The formatting is not consistent because revenue is shown as a negative number in the "everything else" data format, while it's shown as a positive in the LPS data.

Google sheets doesn't have a table function but I'll write the categorization -> everything else name -> LPS name to show the equivalencies. Expenses -> Gross operating expenditures -> Expenditure Non-tax / other revenue -> Other revenues -> Non-tax levy revenue Tax levy funding -> net tax levy supported operating budget -> Tax levy revenue

They are likely running $0 profit budgets here, so the revenue should match to the expense. Although this is just my guess.

This is my understanding at a quick glance. I don't have background with these documents, the City of London budget process, or line item descriptions specifically.

You can actually see the mapping using the page 171 document because at the top the Animal Services lines are also recorded in the LPS format: From LPS doc: From everything else doc: The 2024 and beyond numbers line up.