Small cities overcome hurdles to win budget award.

• Author: Dickinson, Lucille
• Position: Winners in the 1996 Government Finance Officers Association's Distinguished Budget Presentation Awards Program

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. In 1996, 633 awards were distributed.

Preparing a budget in a small jurisdiction poses particular challenges. Budgets may be smaller, but few staff are available for budget preparation, and time-saving technologies may be limited. Government Finance Review invited officials from two small cities that have won the GFOA budget presentation award to share their experiences: the challenges they faced and how they overcame them to prepare award-winning budgets.

City of Mount Rainier, Maryland

The City of Mount Rainier is a city of 8,000 people with fewer than 40 employees. Although the city was awarded the GFOA's Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for its FY1993 budget, which was prepared in large part by part-time elected officials, it did not win the award again until its FY1996 budget. The city's experience over these four years details the importance of continuity in analyzing and presenting financial information. Continuity has enabled the city to build on the previous budget cycle's document, refining it over time to become ever more comprehensive and cohesive in its description and analysis of the city's activities and plans.

Mount Rainier is located along the northeast border of Washington, D.C. While it has an attractive residential core area of 1,100 single-family homes, it has moderate to serious problems with decay and crime in its three small commercial areas and problems with crime in a couple of large apartment complexes on the city's northern border: Of its $2 million budget, roughly 40 to 45 percent goes to its full-service police department, 30 to 35 percent to public works, 15 to 17 percent to general government, and 8 to 10 percent to recreation/outreach and nondepartmental costs.

The hurdle facing such a small jurisdiction with expensive services is the availability of staff expertise and time. For many years, the central administrative staff was made up of no more than two full-time equivalent employees. In preparing the budget, the part-time elected officials performed much of the time-consuming and detailed technical work that full-time staff perform in larger jurisdictions. The elected officials prepared an annual line-item budget sufficient to work with and control spending during the ensuing year, but with all five offices up for election every other year, it was difficult, if not impossible, to build on previous years' efforts. For example, after the city received the GFOA budget award for FY1993, it hired a consultant to prepare the FY1994 budget. The consultant produced a working line-item budget for FY1994 with impressive narrative and measures. Resources were extremely tight, however, and officials were overworked. The effort the city's officials and small staff had devoted to preparing the budget and the budget ordinance had to be focused on the next task. Neither the consultant nor...