State Budget Calculators Help People
Learn about Tough Choices

By Kyle Margules Orland
J-Lab Staff Writer
April 15, 2003

Minnesota's budget this year is deep in red ink -- $4.2 billion in the red. Programs need to be cut, money needs to be raised, and the governor and the state legislature are braced for some tough decisions.

Minnesota Public Radio, however, doesn't think the elected officials should have all the fun. So MPR recently created "Budget Balancer," an interactive exercise that invites ordinary people to help solve the state's budget problems.

More than 5,000 people have participated since the exercise was launched March 12, and response has been positive, said Andrew Haeg, a reporter for MPR's Interactive Journalism unit who helps manage the project.

One user wrote to the station: "I am an elected city official in my new home, and as head of finance, I am making these decisions on my local level. I surprised myself at what I considered cutting things that I would have said were sacred. This was a very cool exercise."

Minnesota's "Budget Balancer" is one of several online budget games that news organizations across the country have launched in recent months to help people learn about looming state deficits. New Hampshire Public Radio has a "Budget Builder," and in California, the Sacramento Bee also has a "Budget Balancer."

The Bee's online form, which has been up since Jan. 26, asks users to cut money from various government projects and add money to various taxes until the gap is closed. When finished, users can e-mail their plan to California Gov. Gray Davis and other local politicians.

The response has been "overwhelmingly positive," said Bee columnist Dan Weintraub. "People in the Capitol were reproducing it and taking it to meetings with constituents."

All three games invite users to choose where to trim costs from programs and where to raise additional revenue.

Minnesota's "Budget Balancer" asks people to make tough decisions about how to close the revenue gap. As users navigate through the game, message boxes pop up pointing out the potential political and economic consequences of every decision that they make.

"As those [consequence] boxes pop up, you get the sense that the consequences of the actions ... seem fairly severe," Haeg said. "We hope this game shows people that this is not an easy deal."

Users are invited to send comments to the station at the end of the exercise. "It's amazing the degree to which people spend time writing thoughtful answers on substantive topics," Haeg said.

Talk about the game has also spilled into MPR's online forums, where users argue about the merits of their particular tax solutions.

"I think this is a great way to help influence our politicians and maybe even give them a few good ideas to work with," writes an MPR forum user using the handle ChiTrader. "They seem reluctant to make the hard choices, but if enough of us raise our voices about what is really important to us as Minnesotans, maybe they can muster enough courage to actually do what they are paid to do on our behalf."

NHPR's "Budget Builder" lets participants raise their voices by allocating funds for their ideal and "best guess" budgets. Users can compare their spending priorities to the actual state budget and to budgets submitted by other users.

"It's an interesting challenge to get people over the threshold of using it," said NHPR Senior News Editor Jon Greenberg. Early on, he said, the game was getting more curiosity seekers than players.

Greenberg said people would receive an email link to the game and say, 'Oh that's interesting, I should do it,'Ó only to ask "Do I really know enough to fill this out?" once they got to the page.

The public radio network is reconfiguring its message to urge users to "let values be your guide" and to offer feedback on "What do you want?" not "What do you know?"

All three news organizations implemented their online budget games in different ways. In Sacramento, the online budget calculator was a companion to a pullout print section that asked readers to "fix the budget mess - your way."

"David Holwerk, the editor of the editorial pages, thought it would be fun to engage groups of readers in an interactive 'game' to balance the budget," said Weintraub, who worked on the game.

Weintraub said the paper has exceeded goal of engaging the public "in understanding the complexity of closing the state's $30 billion budget gap."

In Minnesota, Haeg said the game was the product of three weeks work by six MPR employees and the Interactive Journalism unit, plus members of California-based Redhill Studios, which helped develop the technology behind the game. The reporters and editors consulted with outside analysts, interest groups and government agencies to get information about potential budget solutions.

Haeg seemed excited about the future of MPR's Interactive Journalism unit. "Like any conversation, this is just the beginning, and as the trust builds up it will only get better," he said.

"It's an education process for us and for the institutions. As it continues, we'll start to be able to have an impact on our news agenda, leading to stories that are deeper, more compelling and more human."