Public Figures: Why communication and good interpersonal skills are essential for public finance staff.

• Author: Emerson, Sandra

A public budget is a means of communicating community priorities and a plan for guiding public administrators in executing discretionary decision-making and undertaking practical means for getting results.

Several decades of teaching in a Master of Public Administration program, where my students were typically employed in local, regional, and state government, have made two things evident. First, budgets are not clearly communicating community priorities--citizens and local legislators look at the reams of pages that comprise budgets and are hard pressed to discern what this document is trying to communicate. Second, it is neither obvious nor common sense just how staff should communicate the complexities of public budgets to a wide array of readers who vary significantly by age, education, and interest.

This experience has given rise to two emerging realities, which dovetail with GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting initiative.

REFRAMING THE BUDGET DISCUSSION

In The Public Administrator's Companion: A Practical Guide (see sidebar), we recommend that practitioners begin by systematically exploring what the public knows and wants to know about city expenditures and consequences. Most importantly, consider who the audience is for budget discussions. Unlike a classroom situation in which participants are roughly the same age with like educational experiences, the public looks more like a worship service with vastly different educational backgrounds and a wide range of ages. We are not suggesting hymns and responsive readings, but that less text and more graphics reach a broader, more diverse audience. In addition to who is in the audience is the question of why they are in the audience in the first place. What is the objective of this public budget meeting? Is the objective to "educate the public about the budget" or to educate the finance staff about the public's understanding of budget priorities, values, and issues?

What does the public need to know versus what is "nice to know"? Considerable space and time are dedicated to discussing and describing revenues. While this is an obvious topic regarding budgets, it is tangential. The decisions about what the taxes are, what the rates are, who collects taxes, where, and when are not up for discussion during the budget cycle. Revenue is at best a description of what is, not a decision to be made.

The budget discussion is about how to spend the money we have on the goods and services that are important to...