Spending, coin by coin, year by year
The same "for every $100 in the budget" visualization from the main budget tool — grouped by department (like a dodged bar chart, one color per year) or by department over time.
All departments compared
One department over time
Why coins instead of a line
A stacked line chart showing all eight departments' share of the budget over time is accurate, but it's genuinely hard to read — lines cross, colors blend, and a shrinking category at the top of the stack can look like it's growing because the categories below it got bigger. "All departments compared" arranges every department along the x-axis with six mini coin-columns clustered inside each — like a dodged bar chart, one color per year — so you can see every department's growth pattern at a glance and compare them to each other directly. "One department over time" zooms into a single department's six-year run for a closer look at just that story.
Sources and methodology
Same source and category groupings as the "Spending Priorities Over Time" tool: FY2025, FY2026, and FY2027 Approved Budget documents, each Adopted Budget figure for that fiscal year (not year-end actuals), FY2022 through FY2027. Categories: Schools = Total School appropriation. Police = NSPD + Dispatch + Animal Control. Fire = NSFD. Roads = Highway + DPW. Debt = Total Debt Service. Govt = Town Council, Probate Court, Legal, Municipal Court, Administration, Town Clerk, Planning, Board of Canvassers, Finance, Tax Assessor, IT, Juvenile Hearing Board. Parks = Parks & Rec + NS Library. Other = remainder. Each year's coin count is that department's share of the that year's own total budget, rounded to the nearest whole dollar per $100 — so a coin stack's height is always relative to its own year's full pie, letting you compare shares across years even as the total budget itself grew.