This is just a test of the emergency Toledo budgeting system...

This is a test of the Emergency Toledo budgeting System. The blogcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual budget emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This blog serves the Northwestern Ohio area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Toledo Budgeting System.

That's what you might think after reading this Toledo Blade article that states in part:

Insisting it's just an exercise, Toledo's finance director, John Sherburne, has asked all city department directors to submit a proposal for cutting their budgets by 7 percent in 2007.

"This is an exercise to see if they can do it and to see if they can cost out the services they are providing," he said yesterday.


A little further in the article it states:

Mr. Finkbeiner said the city's finance department is trying out a new budget philosophy called "outcome-based budgeting," aimed at requiring departments to focus on what they should be doing, rather than on continuing what they have been doing.

"Outcome-based budgeting" or "zero-based budgeting" has been around for quite some time. It's a different way of developing budgets. Rather than use what has been budgeted in the past and just add for inflation it starts with nothing then only budgets which programs/costs are determined are necessary.

Some interesting articles for those of you who want to read more, Pittsburg discussed this last year:

David Miller, a public policy expert at the University of Pittsburgh and former budget director for Mayor Tom Murphy, said outcome-based budgeting -- also called zero-based budgeting -- has been used with various degrees of success by some governments since the 1980s.

"The idea of starting with a clean piece of paper each year is a good conceptual way of doing budgeting," he said. "It forces budget developers to be much more cognizant of justifying their expenditures."

American City & County Magazine has an article from last year on the increased use of out-come based budgeting:

Hutchinson (Peter Hutchinson, co-author of “The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis”) says outcome-based budgeting requires a change in mindset — from thinking about paying for costs and funding departments to thinking about purchasing outcomes for residents. “It takes a lot of energy to get people to think differently, and they don't all make it the first time around,” he says. “Most proposals are some version of what they've always submitted. It takes a second round or a second year or iteration for people to really start to get the idea.”

The concept of outcome-based budgeting is one that has been promoted by the DLC and this has also been supported by Republicans as this Michigan GOP press release shows.

If you want to go really deep into this type of budgeting process as opposed to the traditional ones I recommend this pdf from the Center for the Study of Social Policy by Mark Friedman.

I think it is an idea that holds a great deal of potential if City Government can join together to put into this process what is necessary for it to work. So while today might be a "test of the emergency budgeting system", the future could be different...