Committee Works to Change Budget Process
Strategic Planning & Budgeting Committee
Author: Anonymous
In early 1998, the City of Boulder established a Strategic Planning & Budgeting Committee made up of representatives from City staff and City Council. Its mission: "To design and implement a new strategic planning and budgeting process that would help set goals and priorities and develop fiscally sound budgets to support them." Tom Eldridge and Gordon Riggle represented City Council on that committee. They recently addressed the members of Boulder Tomorrow about the current budget situation and the committee's work.
"There's one thing I want to make perfectly clear," City Councilman Gordon Riggle said, "The trends and issues impacting the current and future budgets for the City of Boulder are not new."
In fact, he went on to explain, the growth in sales and use tax revenues actually began to slow in the early 1990s, when annual growth of nearly 20 percent began to decline sharply, culminating in a growth rate of just 3.9 percent in 1997.
"In the 1970s and 1980s, when Boulder was the retail center for the entire County, supporting our City services with sales tax revenues wasn't an issue," Riggle said. "But now, we're faced with future revenues that will just keep pace with inflation, which means that the City's purchasing power will not increase at all. In short, the era of zero, no growth budgets is here."
The changing financial environment in Boulder makes it essential, Riggle said, to begin setting realistic goals, establishing firm priorities, and making some very hard choices about how funds are spent in the future.
"The flat projections for the City's tax base cannot possibly begin to support all the plans for the future that the City already has in place. Moreover, the City's ability to respond to this new financial reality is limited by the fact that half the City budget is earmarked for very specific services," he said.
According to Tom Eldridge, forecasts predict that the next couple of years will be difficult in Boulder, as inflation outpaces revenue growth and as renovations on Crossroads Mall get underway.
"This budget issue is very large, and it's going to take some time to work our way out of it. We have to start adjusting our expenditures. Government's solution to this is all too often to raise taxes, and I just don't think that's going to happen right now," Eldridge said.
In addition to recommending a new budget development process that involves City Council and the public earlier, the committee also made some general recommendations to reduce risks and bring Boulder's budget more in line with other municipalities.
"We want to raise and discuss policy issues in January, not July. We want all the boards and commissions up to speed on what's happening, and we want constant Council input on changes as they occur," Eldridge said.
"Traditionally we have had a day and a half study on the budget. We're going to try and do a much better job. We want to pick out what is important and do a serious analysis," he added.
Data provided by Boulder Tomorrow, comparing the costs of providing services in Boulder to costs in other front range cities, raised some interesting issues, according to Eldridge. As a result, he decided to do a few comparisons of his own, using Davis, California, and Blacksburg, Virginia, as two more comparison points.
"In looking at just two categories: number of City employees per 1000 citizens and cost of services per citizen, it would look like Boulder might be able to reduce employees. And since 2/3 of our budget is employment costs, there just might be some tough times in the City during the next couple of years."
As Gordon Riggle summed it up, "We can afford everything we need in Boulder, but not everything we want."
