Budget Talks Before the Budget – What a Great Idea
From his blog: The View from Ward Three
On Thursday, council members spent the afternoon with city staff for some early talks about the budget. This is the first time in several years that we've talked about what some city services actually cost, and it was good to see more detailed numbers than we've had in the past. I appreciate the effort that staff put into developing this year's budget binders – it's good to have the additional information, and I know that some of the details were eye-opening for some of the newer members of council.
Having this information available led to the most open budget discussion that I can recall with the current council, and as I've said in the past, the more ideas that are put on the table, the better direction we are able to give city staff, and the better decisions we'll be able to make.
For some services, we were given costs going back a few years, for others, it was just last year's cost, with the projected cost for this year. Having costs going back a few years shows, for example, that our spending on floral decorations has more than doubled, to $38,000, over the last five years. If that kind of detail had been available for last year's budget talks, perhaps we could have identified that we would rather have put the money towards another, less optional, service.