Survey Question

Changing course in Newburg

As city manager, you were successful in converting the new city council members from critics to allies supporting your ideas for changes in the city's budgeting process. Newburg's informal goal and priority setting and purely incremental revenue and expenditure projections had both impeded responding to changing needs and circumstances and had created many pockets of inefficiency. Describe the new process you are bringing to the council for approval:

• How will you restructure the goal and priority setting part of the process?
• What changes will you make to projecting revenues and mandatory expenditures?
• How will you get individual units to think about how they spend the funds they've been allocated? How will you go about shifting funds from units that face falling demand for their services or could perform just as well with less resources to those that are under-resourced relative to the demand for the services they provide? How will you free up resources for new initiatives?
• How open will your new allocation process be?
• How will you help those inside and outside city government understand why these changes are happening?