Essay Instructions: Municipal Budget Project Paper Guidelines
Budgets are intended to address a number of different purposes including management and control, communication to different constituencies, goals, past successes, philosophy of the public entity, and to explain the functions of the various departments, etc. Also, public administration professionals must be able to analyze the financial health of an entity by examining the budget. Assess how well available budget documents and auxiliary information address each of these functions. The assessment needs to be substantiated with examples and information from documents studied.
You may use a variety of resources for this project. You will want to start with the most recent year’s approved budget. You may use accounting reports for information; however, you will want to base your budget figures off of the budget book as accounting detail does not provide the line items for personnel, ERE, supplies, travel, etc. You may also use department website information, other reports, laws/rules, a recommendation book if available may provide additional detail, interviews with city/department staff, or other relevant sources.
The paper should include, at a minimum, answers to the following sections and specific questions. There is no specific page requirement for the paper; however, “A” papers are typically approximately 20 pages, double-spaced. The paper must be in APA format.
? By the date designated in the syllabus you must submit via the course assignments tool:
1) the municipality you have chosen for your project
2) the specific department or program for parts 2, 3, & 4
3) the link to the main budget document online or how you acquired the hard copy
Part One ??" General Overview:
1. Introduction: Provide a brief historical background on the city and future projections for growth. What was the population change during the past year; five years; ten years?
2. Expenditures: What are the five largest operating expenditure categories by subject/service area (i.e. social services, protection, recreation, public works, etc) and the respective amounts?
3. Revenues: What are the major sources of revenues (include amount and percentages) for the overall budget? How much have local taxes increased during the past year; five years; ten years?
4. Enterprise Activities: What are the major enterprise/proprietary funds (self-funded services ??" such as water, solid waste, trash collection, etc.) and the total revenues and expenditures involved in enterprise activities?
5. Municipal Debt: What was the total cost of debt service (annual payment)? What is the total bonded indebtedness and the overall per capita debt? Provide bond ratings.
6. From your analysis, what seems to be driving the real (above inflation) increases in the annual expenditure budgets, and what future budget issues have you identified(issues such as growth, increasing health care costs, infrastructure needs, federal/state mandates, etc. may play a role here)?
Part Two ??" Budget Reduction Exercise (Select one department or specific program of the city that is primarily funded from the General Fund if possible for Parts 2, 3, & 4. In this section, you will develop a 10% operating budget reduction proposal for your selected department or program.):
1. As a point of introduction for Parts 2, 3 & 4, provide a brief overview of the department or specific program within the city that you have chosen.
2. Using a table, present the current budget then develop a budget planning scenario in which you make a 10% reduction in the operating budget for the coming fiscal year.
3. What specific strategy or method of prioritizing the necessary budget cuts did you use? Present and defend your reasoning; it would be useful to refer to the course readings/theory to support your process.
4. Discuss any projected loss in services and identify the primary and secondary impacts to the citizens of the budget reduction.
Part Three ??" Budget Request (Using the same department/program for the budget reduction exercise, write a budget proposal for an increase in the budget. This need not be a 10% increase ??" it can be any amount, but should address a specific problem or issue as explained below. Remember that only persuasive budget requests get funded, so be clear, concise and help policy makers understand what they will be getting for the additional funds.):
1. Describe the problem or issue that the increase of budget will address (new service to be offered, increase customer service, etc. ??" you may be creative, but try to be relatively realistic). Be sure to develop a problem or issue to address here, do not simply reverse the budget cuts you implemented in Part 2.
2. Describe how the proposed budget increase will specifically address the problem or issue.
3. What alternatives to address the same problem or issue were reviewed before selecting this specific budget increase? (Considering alternatives is vital to a strong argument as it will help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of your own proposal ??" do not shirk this step.)
4. Using the budget format of your program, develop a line item budget for the increases.
5. What specific performance measures will be used to measure the success of this increase?
Part Four ??" Evaluating How a Program Measures Success (Using the same department/program, again, please answer the following questions in 1-2 paragraphs ??" maximum ??" for each question):
1. Does the program (again, this is for the dept/program with which you are working, not the entire city) have clearly defined mission statement and goals that are easily understood?
2. Does the program have clearly defined performance measures to indicate success in achieving the goals and the mission?
3. Are the numbers used for the performance measure meaningful and easily understood by the average citizen?
4. Discuss whether the program mission, goals, and performance measures clearly meet the citizen’s demands for results.
5. What suggested changes would you recommend to this program’s mission, goals, and performance measures?
I would like to use the follow:
National Park Service
Funding has been and continues to be a challenge for NPS. World War II had presented challenges for the NPS. Director Newton Drury had been faced with the task of protecting the nation’s parks from those who wanted to use their resources for the war efforts he was besieged by many committee who wanted to use historic cannons for scrap metal, he managed to keep the parks intact. Even so the war years took their toll on the parks. Tight budgets left the NPS unable to adequately maintain facilities; and with the return on peace and the subsequent increase of travel, the parks’ problems became painfully evident. The affordability of automobiles allowed the middle class a newfound mobility, visitation to national parks swelled, overwhelming run-down facilities. On June 26, 1956, in the midst of the Cold War, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act, approving the creation of a 41,000-mile highway system to improve military mobility. These new roads meant that travel and, consequently, park visitation were sure to increase even more (Lee).
The challenges that Director Newton Drury faced during WWII are the same challenges many of the NPS Directors faces today. On March 17th 2010, NPS Director Jarvis told members of a House Subcommittee that “difficult economic times call for creativity, Director Jarvis told members of a House subcommittee when he presented the bureau’s 2011 budget request.” (inside.nps.gov). The $ 2.73 billion budget proposal for the National Park Service is $22 million less than the 2010 appropriations, “a fact of these economic times,” Jarvis said. “we will be creative to meet the needs of Park visitors, protect resources, and continue our partnerships that help revitalize communities through local recreation and historic preservation projects. “This budget supports our mission,” Jarvis said in his testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies (Ibid).
Agency funding. The primary source of revenue used to fund the NPS is the general population- taxes, make donations, and pay fees to visit the various parks. In fact, fees collected from park visitors under FLREA have increased NPS annual revenue by tens of millions of dollars. Another important source of funding for the NPS is its partners. Partner organizations-such as the congressionally mandated National Park Foundation and any number of other independent national, state, and local organizations-conduct fundraising activities designed to support individual parks and the Service as a whole.
The development of a budget is multi-staged. It starts at the park, then moves through several levels of review and approval before finally being passed into law. As the budget request moves through the various levels of development, it “snowballs.” That is, the park unit budget becomes part of the regional budget, which in turn becomes part of the total NPS budget, and so forth. At each level, the budget is also subject to modification, as politicians, partners, and special interest groups lobby for how federal money should be allocated or used. It can take more than 20 months to prepare a budget for any given fiscal year. Thus, at any given time the NPS is working on three separate budgets: two in the proposal stages, and one that is being enacted. “As a consequence of the blurred authority, heads of federal agencies, unlike their counterparts in industry, cannot set the level of their agencies’ budgets. Rather, budgets must be submitted to department heads, who submitted them in turn to the Office of Management and Budget, which submits them in turn to the president, who in turn submits them to Congress (Grover, 2008, 13).
References:
The National Park Service. (2002, March). Retrived November 2010, from U.S. History.com http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1605.html
Grover, S. (2008). Managing the Public Sector. New York: Paulist Press.