Budgetary Policy

[Paul Prince]

Council and Staff,
As requested at the last Council meeting by the Mayor, I am initiating this discussion thread. The primary objective is to update the "Fiscal and Budgetary Policy" to align with the budget process I had proposed to Council in last year's February strategic work session.

The current Fiscal and Budgetary Policy document is 23 pages long with 13 sections. I think a pretty significant cleanup through the entire document is needed, and suggest that this be assigned to the Finance Sub-Committee (Saum, Owen, Prince, and Staff members) to be brought back to council in the March timeframe for discussion and possible adoption.

For now, I have attached here a markup (redline and clean) of only the first two sections.
The proposed budget process is in Section II.1, "II. Operating Budget, 1. Preparation".

It would be helpful to have agreement to follow this (or a modification of this) process as we go into our February strategic planning discussions.

Paul

 

[Shane Saum]

Thank you, Councilman Prince, for initiating this and for putting a concrete starting point on the table. I agree with the path forward of assigning this work to the Finance Subcommittee and bringing a refined proposal back to Council in March.

On the redline you shared, I like the overall direction and agree with several of the proposed changes, including removing the Comprehensive Plan language and adopting the clearer, more predictable annual budget schedule. I also support using this framework as guidance as we head into our February strategic and budget discussions.

One addition I would like the subcommittee to consider incorporating is the budget discipline approach we used last year, where departments begin with a baseline that is 10 percent below the prior year’s actual spend or budgeted amount, whichever is less, and are required to provide clear, exceptional item explanations for any requests above that level. I believe this helped focus discussions on priorities rather than incremental growth and would be valuable to formalize.

I also think there is an opportunity to further shorten and simplify the policy overall while preserving the core guardrails around transparency, accountability, and Council oversight. I look forward to continuing that refinement as part of the subcommittee work.

Finally, since the proposed process includes a February post-mortem on the prior year’s budget, I would like to confirm that we include this as part of the February 5th discussion item I previously requested, with staff prepared to walk through that review consistent with the framework outlined here.

Appreciate the work on this and look forward to continuing it collaboratively.