Rochester, NY – Monroe County’s biggest town – Greece – spends only $18 per resident on sanitation annually. Henrietta spent only $10 a year per citizen on public safety in 2007. Per capita, Brighton spends big on culture and recreation, dropping $169 for each resident in 2007.

These are just some of the findings available through the new “Benchmark New York” tool, created by the Business Council of New York and the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center.

Site creators say benchmarking is a common practice in business, helping companies gauge how well they’re doing against their competition. So they’re applying the concept to government, providing the tools to help citizens ask questions about how their tax dollars are being spent.

E.J. McMahon is a fellow with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank. He says his organization wants the tool to ignite public debate about taxation and spending in New York.

“The more you know, the more you want to find out, the more you want to learn. And a better informed public is a public that gets more engaged. Taxpayers can feel like they .. really do have some information. Ultimately … the guiding principal behind this … is that knowledge is power, and it’s a way of empowering taxpayers.”

The tool is online at www.SeeThroughNY.net, and it’s compiled from data from the state comptroller’s office, which collects local finance reports for towns, villages, cities and counties.

Benchmark New York can be used to pull up data for a single municipality, or to draw comparisons across regions or the entire state.

For example, a listing of New York cities’ expenditures per capita shows Geneva near the top; it has the fourth highest spending per citizen in the state. Rochester makes 14 on that list, and Canandaigua comes in at 25, on the list of 60 cities.

In addition to providing fodder for citizen activists and journalists, McMahon says the data can be useful to government executives, to help them assess why their expenditures are higher than those of their peers. And Kenneth Adams, with the Business Council, says the data can also help businesses see where their taxes are going.

“First we’re getting [business owners] to focus on this issue of the property tax, which of course they pay the bill, they know the problem. But that’s about local spending … that’s a local tax. And so we want to just deepen their awareness of local government spending, make it easy for them to figure out what’s happening at the local level, and … take this government spending conversation to the local communities that they’re in.”

Right now, data is available only for the most recent year that it was compiled – 2007 – but it’ll be updated as new information becomes available. In the future, McMahon says he hopes to add features that will allow users to calculate the entire tax burden for localities, using village, town, county, and school tax figures.

WXXI has pulled several data sets using Benchmark New York.

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