Canadian winners of the GFOA Budget Presentation Award.

• Author: Ridgway, Wayne
• Position: Government Finance Officers Association - Canadian News

The GFOA's Distinguished Budget Presentation Awards Program is dedicated to improving governmental budgeting by evaluating operating budgets against a list of mandatory and general criteria. Budgets, submitted by finance directors, are reviewed by three independent finance professionals who evaluate the document using 26 criteria developed by the Committee on Governmental Budgeting and Management's Budget Awards Subcommittee. Since its inception in 1984, 653 governments have received the award.

Of those award-winning budgets, five have been from Canadian provincial or local governments. Two of those Canadian winners were recognized for their 1995 budgets: the City of Kamloops, British Columbia (population 75,000), and the City of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (population 17,000). Government Finance Review editors invited the finance officials of each city to share their experiences in preparing the award-winning budgets. Their stories appear below.

City of Kamloops, British Columbia

The City of Kamloops received the GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award on its first submission. For the finance department, it was a reward for time and effort expended and a motivation to improve and build on the budget document.

The City of Kamloops is located in the interior of British Columbia with a population of 75,000 and a budget of about $100 million. The city uses a modified version of program performance budgeting, with the budget being broken into 38 programs which provide services to the public and 12 programs which provide either internal support or administrative services. The budget document must be provided to the council the first week in December. Given that most management staff take vacation during the summer, the budget process has to be completed in three months.

The city treasurer attended the 1994 GFOA annual conference in Minneapolis in June and was motivated to prepare a budget document along the lines of those on display. The challenge was to complete this task for the 1995 budget document with the same staff and within the budget process' tight time frame.

The city's previous budget document was made up of mostly numbers. While it presented a complete picture of the budget with good summary schedules, the picture was only clear to those familiar with the story being told. In fact, probably only the budget section of the finance department could make use of all the information provided.

Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, the city looked for examples from which to draw. The City of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, had won the award, and its staff was helpful in providing Kamloops with a copy of its award-winning budget document. Reference material also was available from GFOA's publications and conference material.

While Kamloops did not copy them, these materials were very useful in providing ideas and stimulating discussion. Sometimes they served as examples of items Kamloops would present differently. For example, a decision was made to limit the verbiage as compared to some of the examples and to use more white space and graphs throughout the document. It also was decided to include more numbers than the examples did to maintain consistency with the previous budget document.

One of the objectives of expanding the budget document was to convey the scope of services provided by each program and the cost of the services. This also would be an opportunity to articulate the program's mission statement and long-term goals. The budget staff relied on the program managers to provide most of the detail for each program report. Referring...