What the Borough Spends

How this was put together: Every figure below comes from Glen Ridge's own "Municipal User Friendly Budget" (UFB) filings, a short standardized form the NJ Division of Local Government Services requires every municipality to file alongside its much denser "Adopted Municipal Budget." All were downloaded directly from https://www.glenridgenj.org/budget/ and read with pdftotext (or, for two scanned/rotated years, read directly as page images) -- no figure here was estimated or inferred from a secondary source. For each year, three headline numbers were pulled from that year's own UFB: the municipal purpose tax rate (dollars per $100 of assessed value), the municipal purpose tax levy (the total dollar amount raised via that tax), and the total municipal budget (all-operating-funds appropriations, from the UFB's Appropriations Summary sheet). Year-over-year % changes shown on this page are calculated here from each year's own adopted figures (not copied from the borough's own internal comparison %, which sometimes uses a later-amended prior-year total as its baseline -- see known_caveats).

Known limits and corrections:

1. No total-budget (appropriations) figure is available for 2016: the borough's uploaded 2016 UFB PDF contains only the Property Tax Breakdown sheet (3 near-identical pages), not the Appropriations Summary sheet the other years include -- tax rate and tax levy are still available for 2016 since those live on the page that is present.
2. The borough's site links a document labeled "2017 User Friendly Budget," but that PDF is byte-for-byte identical (confirmed via checksum) to the one linked as "2018 User Friendly Budget" -- it is a scanned copy of the actual 2018 filing (its own cover page reads "Year: 2018," status "Introduced"), not a 2017 document. No genuine 2017 UFB appears to be published on the site. 2017's figures on this page are instead pulled from the 2018 UFB's own "prior year" comparison columns and its 2017 calendar-year tax table, which independently agree with each other.
3. No User Friendly Budget for 2019 is linked on the site at all (the year is simply skipped in the site's own list, jumping from 2018 to 2020). 2019's figures here come from the 2020 UFB's "prior year" comparison columns instead.
4. Total-budget year-over-year % changes computed here will usually read a few points higher than the borough's own internal comparison %, for a structural reason, not an error: NJ municipal budgets are routinely amended upward mid-year (added grants, insurance proceeds, etc.), and each year's own UFB compares its new total against the prior year's amended (larger) final total, not its originally adopted total. This page always uses each year's own originally-adopted total as the baseline for both years in a comparison, so the two series are apples-to-apples across the whole decade -- meaning our computed 2022-2023, 2024-2025, and 2025-2026 growth figures are larger than what each of those years' own UFB states internally for the same comparison. The same amendment effect shows up once in the tax levy series: 2022's UFB lists 2021's actual levy as $11,979,139.66, about $70,000 lower than the $12,049,215.54 the 2021 UFB itself reported as its own current-year levy; this page uses each year's own reported figure rather than a later restatement.
5. The municipal purpose tax rate fell sharply twice in this decade -- 2019 (0.800 to 0.667) and 2026 (0.771 to 0.457) -- and both line up with jumps in Glen Ridge's total taxable valuation (a townwide property revaluation resets assessed values, so the same or a growing tax levy is spread over a much larger assessed base, mechanically lowering the rate even though most tax bills don't fall by the same percentage). The 2026 revaluation is confirmed directly in the 2026 UFB: total taxable valuation jumped from $1,729,624,400 (Oct. 2024) to $2,995,727,600 (Oct. 2025), a 73% increase, while the tax levy still grew 2.58%. The 2019 drop is not documented as explicitly -- no single UFB states a revaluation occurred -- but taxable valuation is known to have risen from $1,382,209,500 (Oct. 2017, per the 2018 UFB) to $1,703,366,100 (Oct. 2019, per the 2020 UFB), a 23% rise over those two years; no document states the intervening Oct. 2018 figure, so this page can't pin down whether that rise was concentrated in 2018, 2019, or split across both.
6. This page covers the Borough of Glen Ridge's own municipal budget only -- not the Board of Education's, which has its own visualization at viz-boe-budget.html and viz-boe-tech.html.
7. Only the 'User Friendly Budget' summary figures were used for the core dataset; the much denser 'Adopted Municipal Budget' (the full state-mandated line-item form) was not mined for department-level appropriation detail for this page, per scope.
8. The appropriations CATEGORY breakdown added to this page (the "USER FRIENDLY BUDGET SECTION - APPROPRIATIONS SUMMARY" table inside each UFB, using NJ's standardized FCOA codes) is only available for 2019-2026 -- 2016-2018 have the same gaps described above, so no category data exists to pull for those years either. The roughly 20 raw FCOA line items are consolidated into 7 broader buckets here purely for chart readability (full code-to-bucket mapping is in scripts/extract_budget_categories.py); one of those raw line items, "Unclassified" (FCOA code 30, folded into "General Government & Admin" here), jumped from $0 in 2025's originally-adopted budget to $3,386,153.27 in 2026 -- the majority of that bucket's apparent year-over-year increase. The UFB doesn't itemize what this line funds beyond the single word "Unclassified," and it appears in the same year as the property revaluation described above; this page reports the figure as filed without speculating further on its cause.

This is a one-time look back, not a live feature — it won't update automatically as new budgets are published. See the borough's own Budget Information page for the current record.