Fixing your financial planning process.

• Author: Miranda, Rowan
• Position: From the editors

State and local governments continue to be mired in one of the most challenging fiscal environments in decades. For the last two or three years, policymakers and administrators have been forced to make difficult choices between painful cuts in services (and associated personnel) and tax and fee increases. While the economy is beginning to show signs of life, real public sector revenue growth is probably still a year or two away.

With media and public attention still squarely focused on state and local finances, this may well be the ideal time to implement much-needed improvements to public budgeting. When the pie is growing, it's difficult to champion efforts to fix flawed budgeting and financial planning processes. Rarely is there the resolve to reform processes that, while far from perfect, seem to work reasonably well. The current fiscal crisis, however, has exposed deficiencies in public budgeting systems and generated some momentum to correct them through efforts such as the adoption of recommended budgeting practices established by the National Advisory Council on State and Local Budgeting.

One of the themes of this issue is how governments can enhance their budget processes. In "What's Wrong with Budgeting?" the authors discuss criticisms being leveled against budgeting and conclude that the time has indeed come to improve the traditional budgeting model. They go on...