Open Data Resources

Where practical, we should design for simplicty in re-use, so it's easy for any other open data project to access our work. Listings of potential data sources or other ideas are below; see the Tooling page for listings of potential technologies for the site.

Open Data Sites We Might Leverage

• Data Portals - meta-listing of open government data portals at a high level.

General Government Data

• Federal Open Data Portal may have relevant standards or structure suggestions worth following.
• The MA State Open Data Portal currently includes 106 records about Arlington, all of them documents (not spreadsheets) of various types.
• MA State Municipal Databank has a variety of high-level reports about all towns/cities in MA.
• UMass Boston list of other useful MA Data sources - a list of various specific data sources in MA
• The Town's Public Records Center includes instructions for making public record or open meeting requests, as well as some useful links to frequently requested data from various departments, including employee pay plans, tax rates, and more.
• The Town's Employee Handbook pages include detailed salary breakdowns for employees as well as benefits and policy information.

Finance And Budget Data

• Municipal Finance Trends Dashboard provides basic financial data with comparisons between communities or trends over time.
• Arlington Financial & Budget Information - homepage for town's budget data.
  • Arlington Visual Budget - provides a graphical top-level view of town expenses and revenue by category, using treemaps and charts; and the Arlington Visual Budget Explainer providing useful explainers to how it works.
  • Public Annual Financial Report (BPAFR) is a very high level four page summary table of key town finances (data from 2011-current).
  • Town Manager's Annual Budget & Financial Report - a detailed financial plan and figures provided by the Town Manager to the Select Board before Town Meeting (data from 2007-current).
  • Annual Town Reports are a rollup of all major town department and committee reports and budgets that are presented at Town Meeting (data from 2005-current).
  • School Budgets provide detailed breakdown of annual school budgets, the largest chunk of the town's whole budget (data from 2007-current).
  • Arlington Open Checkbook - interactive features to see categories and years of spending by the town; includes export functions for core expense data (data from 2016-current).
    • Annual Payroll Summary - See links to PDF and Excel exports of town employee salary (data snapshot from 2018).
    • For each town employee position - including temps and substitute teachers, this data lists Gross, Base, Overtime, and Other salary.
  • Annual Audits of the town finances are completed regularly by an outside auditing firm (data from 2001-current).
  • The Finance Committee reviews all town budgets and provides a report and recommendation to Town Meeting about any warrant articles around the budget (meeting agendas and minutes are available for several years).
  • The Capital Planning Reports To Town Meeting include a review with the town manager around multi-year capital planning (data from 2004-current).
  • Property Tax and Assement Data includes town-wide information on tax classifications, rates, and changes (selected data from 1929; detailed data from 2005-current).

Municipality Statistics

• Housing per square mile by municipality, includes land vs. water size (1999, 2009 datasets) DLS-HousingSqMile.xls
• Road miles by municipality (2004-2013 datasets) DLS-RoadMiles.xls

Comparable Town Government Links

• Comparable town major department (school, budget, police, etc.) landing pages.
• Data Catalog of Comparable town annual reports listing (in progress) Shane has built a listing of landing pages for major town departments & annual reports in all comparable towns here:

Individual statistics

• Population by year (MA calculations, from census)
• US Census aggregate data for town

US Census Data

• Statistical Abstracts included a variety of statistical reports each year in the US through 2011, when the program was discontinued.