Visualizing Albany's 2026 budget expenditures

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Visualize the City of Albany's 2026 proposed budget and its expenditures.

The City of Albany released its proposed budget for 2026 in early October 2025.  We wanted to find some ways to easily communicate and understand both the revenue and expenditures within the budget.  Inspired by a chart that USAFacts built to show Federal revenue & spending, we played around with Sankey diagrams using Flourish (which, as an aside, is a pretty neat tool).  

This is the first of a two-parter, where we show the Expenditures side of Albany's budget.  The City has 48 cost centers (e.g. Law Department, Recreation Programs, Treasurer, etc).  We have a visualization for each cost center.  For each cost center we display its budget (in thousands of $s) and the growth or decline in the budget between the 2025 approved budget and the 2026 proposed budget.  

For example, the "Fire & Emergency Services" cost center has a 2026 proposed budget of $44.006 million.  Its 2025 approved budget was $43.130 million.  This represents a 2% year-over-year growth.

For cost centers that are large or that have interesting expenditure breakdowns we have included additional visualizations that show these breakdowns.  For example, our Debt Service and Bond Anticipation Notes, Fire & Emergency Services and Police Department breakdowns of costs and more. 

Open up the diagram here.  We recommend visualizing this on desktops or tablets; mobile is a little rough.

We are still playing around with this, experimenting with colors, drilldowns, etc.  We'll also be releasing a similar Sankey chart with the City's revenue picture soon.  Any comments/thoughts/issues?  drop an email to albanydatastories@gmail.com.