Budgeting: Messy as sausage making
They say that it’s never advisable to watch sausage being made. The same is probably true for watching a city’s budget being crafted. For the past two weeks, members of the Pine Bluff City Council, sitting as members of various committees, have sat and listened to city department heads talk about their proposed budgets. The days-long process has been tedious and, we would imagine, tiring, but it has also been illuminating as these managers explain the purchases they want to make, the need for more pay for their employees and the overall outlook for their departments.
The process is a moment in time when elected leaders get to drill down into the inner workings of how the city is run. They hear that if pay doesn’t go up, these departments are going to keep losing employees. They also hear why a department needs this big-ticket item or that new software. And every now and then, these elected officials discover something that just straight up needs to be changed, such as a manager’s salary that is less than one of their employees.
At these moments, these council members are fully engaged in making the city run more efficiently and better overall.
Then there is that other moment of reconciliation, the time when reality sets in. In the case of Pine Bluff, two financial analysts were brought on to taste the proposed sausage, and in doing their jobs, they spit it out, at least for now.
What they found was that the expectation of revenue for the overall budget was higher than the average of the past several years. Maybe there are good reasons for that, but the gentlemen recommended that city officials look at the overall numbers again to make sure Pine Bluff wasn’t headed for a financial headache. Now that process will start.
No, this last part has not been particularly pretty. Suddenly, funding that only a day or two before was headed for certain departments was being yanked back. That process, however, is what budgeting is all about.
Most people in management positions in the private sector have been exposed to such exercises over the years. When times are tough, proposed raises don’t materialize, positions are left unfilled and training trips are canceled, for instance.
The same is true for a city. But at the end of the process, the budget has to balance and be sensible. With the attention the budget is getting this year, there is a high likelihood that will happen.