City of Evanston Blog
FY 2012 Budget Preparation Update
The City Council Monday will be receiving a report from City staff on status of our FY 2012 budget preparation. This effort began early this year in March with the understanding that the City will still have deficits in FY 2012 and 2013 and difficult decisions will be required to balance those budgets. The City is facing a $1.5 to $2 million deficit in FY 2012 and I have proposed that the City Council consider cutting an additional $2 million from the City's general operating fund permanently for capital projects.
The City undertook a community outreach effort in May to solicit feedback on issues the City should address in the budget process. This led to a list of 39 areas to examine for service change ideas. In addition, City staff committed to begin a priority based budgeting process comparing each City service to a series of benchmarks.
Staff has spent the last three months evaluating the service change ideas and prioritizing city services and is returning to the City Council on Monday August 8 with the results of this work. A summary document of all this can be found here (PDF) and a nearly 500 page detailed evaluation can be found here (PDF). It is a lot of information. The evaluation of the service change ideas remains a work in progress and looking at City services by priority is a different approach for Evanston and will take some time to re-orient thinking and evaluation of the budget in those terms.
So what have we learned so far?
1. The 39 service change ideas are all over the map. Many of them have the potential to save the City significant upfront financial costs. However, what are the other indirect costs in addition to any upfront savings? What are the impacts to Evanston's quality of life in making these changes? I believe some of these 39 service change ideas will be able to be included in the FY 2012 proposed budget, some may have promise to do in pieces, some may work in future years and some may never be practical when weighing the direct savings versus indirect costs.
2. Some of the 39 service changes that were proposed in May have caused quite the community dialogue since then. For that , I say hurrah!! Democracy only works when people are engaged in the process. I believe it is my responsibility to bring all reasonable ideas forward for discussion, not just the ideas I think are politically popular (ran out of most of those in 2010!!) The discussion and passion caused by some of them help in evaluating their impacts on community standards. The silence in response to other ideas is also interesting.
3. The idea of looking at the City's services based on community priorities is really interesting. It is tough to put a number to all of our varied programs to evaluating them side by side, but we have done it. Spreadsheet of ranking can be found here (PDF). The exercise is only academic unless the community engages to evaluate and comment on the rankings. With agreement to the priorities, then resources should be shifted to those services that are high priorities and those of lower priority should face further scrutiny.
From here, the community and City Council get the month of August to digest all of this. The City will once again reach out to the community during the month of September to get feedback on the service change ideas and the service prioritization. The City will hold two community meetings on September 17 and 22, we will reach out into the community at various locations and residents can provide comments directly on-line, by calling 311 or sending in comments via mail. This will lead to the proposed FY 2012 budget being released on October 7 and City Council budget hearings starting on October 15.
Evanston is a special place. We value our quality of life very much. I hope that this inclusive community dialogue ensures that we continue to provide high quality services in the midst of difficult budget times.
Wally Bobkiewicz, City Manager, City of Evanston
Leave a comment