A city budget is a set of choices. Follow the money, understand the tradeoffs, and see what you would do differently.
Try your priorities First, show me the money ↓The city keeps separate funds for different purposes. Water and sewer operations, debt payments, grants and everyday city services have different funding sources and commitments. A department may receive money from several funds.
“Gross” includes charges and transfers inside city government. “Net” removes the internal activity identified by the city. These views help explain spending; neither is a pool of freely available money.
Amounts are in dollars of that year. The 2026 column is a plan; 2023–2025 are reported actual spending. A difference between them is not automatically a cut, an increase in services or a budget overrun.
2026 net spending by department, across all funds.
Department totals include operating, capital and non-operating expenses. A department can pay costs on behalf of the whole city. View the source table ↗
Explore body cameras, facility repairs, Fire/EMS costs and the questions behind the numbers.
Read the budget guide ↗Try a different mix of General Fund spending. See every dollar you add and where you would need to find it.
Add to one department. Reduce another. Watch the tradeoffs add up.
This experiment covers in gross departmental spending—not the whole city budget. Revenues and other funds stay at the adopted baseline. Changes express your priorities; they are not approved transfers, a legal feasibility review or a prediction of service outcomes.
General Fund source table ↗Enter a positive change to add spending, or a negative change to reduce it. No allocation can fall below zero. Up to $100 million may be added to each department in this prototype.
“What commitments would have to change to make this proposal possible, who can approve those changes, and what would residents experience?” This tool calculates dollar tradeoffs. Those questions still need evidence.
Start with a question. Read what Akron’s budget says, open the exact page, and take a more specific question to council.
A growing guide to the original 2026 budget—not a complete audit. Each answer separates the published facts from what still needs an explanation. Reviewed November 13, 2026.
Source links open the city’s PDF in a new tab. If your viewer starts at the beginning, enter the page number shown. For these entries, the printed and PDF page numbers match.
Start with the budget page and amount. Ask what it buys, what has been spent or committed, and what result residents should expect. A gap in a summary table is a reason to seek more detail; it is not evidence of wrongdoing.
“Copy question & sources” copies text for your own notes. Nothing is sent to the city.
Every baseline comes from Akron’s published 2026 Budget Plan. Here’s what this prototype includes—and what the figures can tell you.
City of Akron, Ohio. Original adopted budget with historical actuals. This is a snapshot, not a live checkbook or an amended budget.
Open the full budget ↗Source retrieved November 13, 2026. Page links use physical PDF pages; appendix labels can differ.
Download the exact dataset behind this site, including source locations, definitions and validation notes.
Download source data ↓Gross spending includes internal transactions. Net spending removes the amounts identified in the city’s reconciliation. Revenue uses a different internal-transaction adjustment. Subtracting the two net headline figures does not establish an available surplus.
2023–2025 figures are actual spending reported in the 2026 book. 2026 figures are adopted spending. We do not label that comparison budget-versus-actual for the same year. Department reorganizations or accounting changes may affect trends.
Historical gross-revenue totals on page 54 do not match the fund rows for 2023 and 2024. We checked the original PDF and the arithmetic. We exclude those historical revenue totals. This is a table discrepancy, not evidence of missing money.
Inspect page 54 ↗Contracts, labor agreements, restricted revenues and other commitments affect what is possible. We have not reviewed the underlying authorities for each change. A dollar reduction does not automatically translate into a particular staffing or service change.
Progress Library’s Akron explorer already offers Census-based comparisons and a 2026 department overview. This prototype adds city-book fund comparisons, page-specific sourcing and a shareable General Fund spending experiment. Its data is taken directly from the city’s book.
This first version does not include vendor payments, the separate capital-project plan, personalized tax calculations, legal conclusions, or public voting. Viewing or sharing a proposal does not submit it to City Hall.