New Challenges Require a New Approach.

• Author: Morrill, Christopher P.
• Position: FROM THE CEO

As we move forward in 2021, local governments are facing many challenges--but we also have unique opportunities to initiate change, work to improve financial sustainability of our organizations, and better focus on our priorities. This year we'll be focused on safety for our citizens and staff, and making sure our frontline workers and our medical teams have the support they need to continue battling the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccinating millions. We hope this year will provide the opportunity to address long-term infrastructure challenges. We hope to improve our own capital planning and asset management practices. We hope to bring together polarized citizens to achieve common goals, restore trust in our government institutions, and ensure transparency in public finance as we continue to deliver public safety, public health, public works, and other critical public services. And we hope to better serve all those in our community as we confront the systemic racial discrimination and economic inequality that hold many of our citizens and communities back.

As public servants, finance officers, and leaders, we must have the courage to recognize where traditional or outdated approaches are failing to address today's challenges, and we must pursue new ideas, seek out new perspectives, and encourage new ways of making decisions. The events of 2020 provided a wake-up call for many local governments that still use incremental budget approaches, across-the-board cuts, and siloed organizational structures that reinforce status quo power structures.

For many local governments, the police budget dominates both the process and proportion of resources. While every community prioritizes the need for public safety, the budget process many governments are using is flawed. It isn't capable of engaging leaders from across the organization or the community in a discussion about how to best meet current challenges and ways to achieve their goals for public safety or other program areas. At the same time, governments often fund those services using revenue policies that were conceived when our economies and communities looked very different, which is neither sustainable nor fair. GFOA has launched two new research initiatives focused on rethinking budgeting, and rethinking revenue. We hope these initiatives will help us work with our members to break down barriers to change, to question policy myths, and to explore new approaches for budgeting. For example, we...