City To Change How it Budgets?

Last night the Common Council met for 3+ hours at the Pyle Center on campus and had a retreat on how it budgets and the comprehensive planning process coming up. Here’s what they had to say about the budget and their priorities. No media there, of course.

Everyone was there except Steve King, Chris Schmidt (sick), Larry Palm, David Ahrens (getting married this weekend), Mark Clear.

Opening Remarks
They started off with opening remarks from Denise DeMarb and Mo Cheeks. DeMarb says that at CCOC they were asked to write down their top 5 budget priorities and they will be building on that. They are looking on how they can work together on issues that they are passionate about, more effectively. They are hoping to do a pilot of priority based budgeting next year and what are their priorities? There will be a lot more coming but this is the kickoff. Cheeks says we have more challenges and more finite resources to address those, he says while some people would like to turn back time or change the nature of our state politics, neither of those are within our control. It’s important that we focus and work collaboratively to solve problems and plan, seriously, to address a small number of things. It’s easy to do small things (constituents, emails, be prepared for a meeting) but its hard to work together to execute a vision for a city – our constituent need and demand that. He says none of them may be on the council for long and he wants them to come out of the meeting more focused.

Goals Exercise
They each put three goals on sticky notes and put them up on the board. They each got assigned a district other than theirs and write what they think the three goals are for a district other than theirs. They go around and talk about how they feel about thinking about another district. They basically said that committee work and their day jobs and life experience made it easier to guess what was important in those districts as well as their knowledge of citywide issues relationship they have with the alders in the district.

That was the 35 minutes of the meeting after they started 20 minutes late. They will go back to this and then I can tell you what their priorities are below.

Priority Based Budgeting
Laura Larson is the new Budget Analyst who worked in Baltimore where they did priority based budgeting and ran their process. Dave Schmiedicke the finance director says that they will give them a presentation on priority based budgeting or outcome based or results oriented budgeting. In general they consider the budget a plan. They basically add a little to each item from last year but do little to assess how those dollars are working and if they meet the goals we have. We had Madison Measures that was started 10 – 12 years ago, there is a lot of data and they try to tie budgeting to that – it was a first step. With Mayor Soglin’s Quality Control Committee and Organizational Effectiveness work within that some agencies have tried to map their processes with their policies and goals. In the last few budgets, before the agencies submit their budgets they had them do presentations in groups to talk about what is going on related to the budget and goals for the next budget to figure out how to approach issues and goals in the areas. He says the struggle is when individual issues come in like neighborhood resource officers and there is not discussion about how to get the same results with maybe a different method. He says that priority based budgeting was one of the key elements of the Racial Equity and Social Justice Initiative.

Larson says currently the budget process has alders working on key things that they may have promised to do during campaigns. What happens is they all have good ideas, and they are probably good investments but they are all over the map. But when the budget comes out the headline will be “oh now, we’re short millions of dollars”. All those important things get lost because we have no money, they cut around the edges and and thin the soup, but the good ideas get lost because we have to do basic services. The question is, what about hose base services, why are we expecting we have to fund them at the base level. Cheeks says because there are people who have jobs. Larson says those people doing the service that is not high value could be used in other places to achieve the results they want. Bidar says they are an expectation, but if we stop them, they will become high value. For instance, if they started picking up trash every other week, they would hear about it. Larson says that without a framework to gauge what is high or low value, everyone would likely say that is a core city service. If they found out something different, couldn’t they look at if they could spend less money in a low value area to be more efficient to use those dollars elsewhere. We need to get to the point where we don’t just accept the assumption that this is what things cost because they are in the base and not get to the goals. We need to get away from what we spent last year, and get to what we want to fund. They need to stop dwelling on what they did a year ago. A challenge is that there are very big departments with only two services – police services and police support. She challenges them to ask their constituents what that means to them. That means they have to break this down into services in the way that citizens interact with them. So when we talk about the budget we are talking about the services not the departments. The really cool thing is that is shifts the conversation, not talking about what they are cutting, but what they want to fund. The framework is built around priority outcomes. In Baltimore their goals were Better Schools, Safer Streets, Stronger Neighborhoods, A Growing Economy, Innovative Government and A Cleaner and Healthier City. These were all built around growing as a city. They have an infrastructure for 1 million people, but they only have 600,000 people and they need to grow their tax space. Each goal has indicators to show that they are achieving the goals. The budget is then based on services provided by agencies that work on the goals and have indicators and performance outcome measures. They don’t have a huge impact in one year, they do look at how programs do to reach they goals and if they have meaningful strategies to change the curve on those goals. They can look at how they collective impact their goals. She uses Racial Equity as an example to show how it might be done here. She says when you start, agencies are good at gamesmanship and they will manipulate the data to tell their stories to get the dollars, but they have to look at the impact they are having on customers. Don’t overstate who you will impact. She says they have to look at the demands and the outputs. They have to ask the customers how well they are doing. You have to ask, is anyone better off? We could have really great services, but nothing changes. This process will get agencies to be creative to give the council better recommendations. It would be not looking at percentage changes from last year, but results we are getting and how we can collectively rethink service delivery in the city. The timeline suggested for this is as we finish the 2016 budget we could work to formalize what a strategic vision would look like with specific outcomes and results they want to achieve and work with agencies to break down their huge silos into services they deliver. And have a full priority based budget by 2018. DeMarb asks what that would look like with agencies working together on a priority with goals. Larson says if you worked on a neighborhood it would be about parks. Library would look at their children’s programming. Within community services they would look at the neighborhood center model and you would look at elements to see how parks and libraries could work on combining their facilities and community services would provide the staffing. Kemble asks how you get people impacted involved in the beginning of the process? Larson says that the budget recommendations were formulated not by analysists in the budget department but by results teams of people that includes citizens and then they had citizen exercises and compared how the results teams recommendations lined up with the citizens recommendations who did the shadow process. You also have to go back to them and show them how it was reflected or explain why they couldn’t do what the citizens wanted. If they want to get started now, they could look at how the council does its processes, or they could formalize the transition in a resolution. They are looking at resolutions from other cities. Rummel asks how this is different than participatory budgeting, Larson says it does include their feedback. In Baltimore they did an annual survey. Cheeks says one of the big difference is for participatory budgeting empowers the citizens and this listens to the public and doesn’t go as far, they just inform the priorities. Eskrich asks about education of the public about the difference between city and county services. Larson says Redmond Washington has a citizens academy, its 6 weeks long and that is how they can learn that. It’s also about how they present the budget. Bidar thinks this is what we should do, but friction happens in the executive vs the legislative branch, but the only way this works is if the whole system is working. They are at a disadvantage since they only work on the budget for 6 weeks. Larson says they can change that. IN Baltimore the Council has no authority to change the budget, they can only cut it, and can’t re appropriate the funds. Bidar asks where the system starts changing. Soglin is in line with making this transition, there is an opportunity to work together on this so we are all starting from the same place. DeMarb supports it to, its a heavy lift, we can’t do this alone, they have to collaborate with the mayor and agencies and we need to figure out where the money comes from, we don’t do this alone. For example, on homelessness the county has a huge piece of that, we need to understand how this all marry up – we need to collaborate, we can’t do this alone. Larson says that there is a lot more to talk about, she recommends that they craft many strategic plans for each outcomes, she recommends “turn the curves” to find what they are working towards and they tell the story, identify the challenges and identify the partners, show what works and where they want to go. With big issues, its not just the city, but having the plan allows partners to plug in – in a meaningful way. Zellers asks if the work plans are tied in to this? Larson says that yes they do in a few years. Chesterfield PA has an excellent model for that. Larson says that helps people move in the same priority direction. Rummel says the capacity of alders is also an issue. Larson says this has to be THE way, not another way to budget. Baltimore just ripped the band aid off, they didn’t pilot it. There was a lot of complaining the first year, but 4 years in its just the way they do it. Its going to be hard, people won’t like it, but if there is leadership behind it and we put our heads down, there is no reason why we can’t do it.

GOALS
They talk about the definition of the SMART goals and think what they have is going in the direction towards the goals, and some of the details will be in the work that come next. These are citywide goals. They reorganize the post-its into groups.

The large goals are (in no order):
Transit and Transportation
Bike and Pedestrian
Affordable Housing
Quality Housing
Homelessness
Economic Development and Jobs
Water
Staff Capacity
Innovation
Early Childhood
Safety
Council Structure
Collaborative Relationships
Internal Analysis/Paradigm Shift
Budget
Parks
Equity
Retaining and attracting talent
Neighborhood Empowerment
Infrasturcture
Clean City
Public Works Services
Enviroment and Sustainability
Traffic Safety
Alcohol
Seniors
Neighborhood Planning
Food
LIbrary

They briefly reorganize them – put water with sustainability. They suggest equity needs to be spread across the board and they need to talk about if there are vision or goal or planning and implementation strategies. They need to go back to that conversation.

They add
Democracy and Transparency (Rummel and Cheeks)

Making their case for priorities
They will get three votes, but they get to make their case for some priorities.

Rummel – Housing should be on the list for everybody, we are in a housing crisis, there is a 2% vacancy rate, housing we are building is at market rate, most people in the city are housing burdened as our studies are showing and are paying more than 30% of their income so we need a strategy to build more affordable housing and we need a strategy to mix up housing in neighborhoods that need more diversity of incomes. (Several people say “sold!”)

DeMarb – Economic Development and Jobs – we need to commit resources in a team of qualified people to help build business in this city. And I don’t mean business or economic development the way we have traditionally looked at it, she means jobs for people for a family living wage to afford the housing and apartments, there are lots of models, Rebecca Kemble can tell you about them, we need to build those models here, we don’t just need teen jobs, we need to build an infrastructure that creates jobs for people who live here.

Phair – Collaboration – Whether looking at education or social services, specifically homelessness, we need to have community engage the rest of our partners in community goals and do that priority based budgeting together as much as possible to say as a city that they can read by 3rd grade, even tho we don’t fund the schools, how do we support that. Same with social services and homelessness.

Cheeks – Transportation Infrastructure will be extremely important to address the last three things we talked about, as we need to plan for more people in the city we need more opportunities to get more people to jobs that are going to be spread out in this relatively large city for only a quarter of a million people and we have families that are disadvantaged just to go to school, it takes over an hour and to get to the grocery is hard, so we need to think about how we will get form point a to b in our city.

McKinney – Racial Disparities should be on everybody’s sheet, its the elephant in the room, it connects everything that we are talking about with a growing population of black and brown minorities, we have to make sure there is an quityable distribution and the lens that we say we are looking through we have to be that example and it has to start with us.

DeMarb – Sustainability, we have a plan, it needs to be reworked, we talk about clean water and infrastructure but we spend no time on the plan or supporting it. We need to understand what is going on in our city with the changing climate and what is going on with our water and our lakes. Racial and ethnic disparity comes under sustainability, without social justice, we cannot be sustainable as a city. Lets talk about the elephant in the room, we never talk about sustainability.

Rummel – Democracy – we need to be able to have as a collective a local power democracy where people inform us, and have real effective ways to help us make meaningful decisions.

Zellers – Neighborhood Planning – that helps engage all of our citizens and should touch on everything that we talked about.

Kemble – Planning in general and how we do it, neighborhood planning should be the center of it, that includes sustainability, transit planning, economic development planning – not that we say it, but that the staff are connected to it through their work.

Bidar – Adds Arts – she thinks that arts should be part of our priority of our city as we talk about racial and economic equity and the ability to bring people together – she thinks it is through arts, like the work on Sherman, you can have a sense of belonging and make the city unique.

Phair – Violence prevention – we live in a violent society and we are not – not affected, especially with young people, we don’t have a violence prevention strategy.

Baldeh – Education – its not our issue but most of our societal problems stem from lack of education and we should find a way to work with the school district to make sure there are enough services and out of school programs.

Cheeks says that they have a youth category, it gets added.

Voting on priorities
They each get three votes – they rank them in first, second, third priority. They can give the same issue more than one vote.

Equity – 14 votes
Affordable Housing – 11 votes
Big Picture Planning – 5 votes
Economic Development – 4 votes

Sustainability – 3 votes
Transportation – 3 votes

Partnerships – 2 votes (also in order by priority of votes)
Safety – 2 votes
Neighborhood Planning – 2 votes

Food – 1 vote
Democracy – 1 vote
Seniors – 1 vote