Annually the Municipal League rates candidates, reports on civic issues, and recognizes public officials, employees and citizens for their contribution to toward improving the quality, openness and responsiveness of our governments. Each of these activities highlights as important piece of quality government:

• Evaluating those who seek to set the policies,
• Understanding significant problems our region's governments are asked to solve, and
• recognizing those who have excelled in working for our region, both in the community and within government.

Over the last few decades, citizen attitudes about government have changed. Citizens are less satisfied with government and are distrustful and suspicious of its leaders and the traditional processes of accountability. The process of establishing public goals often loses itself in polarized campaign debates about more services or lower taxes.

Yet during this same period, many governments have moved a remarkable distance to increase their accountability for what they deliver to their communities, both for the short and long term. The values of these governments are debated annually through the proposal, review and adoption of the budget. The public budget process has evolved over time into a rich resource for a community's change and renewal.

What is a public budget? Essentially, a budget is a plan for what money a government will collect, how it will spend the money and how it will pay for its activities. It also provides a historical record of how funds were spent and what financing means a government used to provide facilities and services. Over time, our conception of a "good" budget has changed.

Six years ago, a popular book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government, described the thrust of the progressive reform movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reacting to the corruption of the political machines of the 19th century, progressive reforms sought to control governmental decisions through procedure and regulation. These controls generally focused on the main components or "inputs" to the system: employees, regulations and money. Civil service exams controlled who would be hired. Regulations controlled an employee's actions. And BARS (Basic Accounting and Revenue System) prescribed accounting for municipal expenditures, focusing entirely on accounting categories such as salaries, rent and supplies.

While responsive to 19th century abuses, these reforms tended to make governments static and less responsive to change. Today, information technology and modern economic structures offer a rich mix of alternative "inputs" that can be combined to achieve efficiencies, lower costs or improve governmental service and responsiveness. As examples, the use of competition, contracted services, cooperation across jurisdictions, volunteer services, and countless other mechanisms provide value to many communities. And over the last decade hundreds of governments have used these techniques to change the way they "do" government.

Northwest municipalities led the development of some of these new ways of "doing government." King County municipalities now use services contracted from other jurisdictions or the private sector, share services provided by one municipality for a region, and use new delivery models for traditional services.

During the course of these changes, however, budgets changed very little. Driven by 19th century progressive reforms and early public accounting rules, municipal budgets were required to follow strict accounting systems and meet minimum standards for disclosure. Yet these budget documents sometimes obscured more than they illuminated.

Faced with a document replete with accounting details and very gross summaries, few citizens had the time or fortitude to mine the budget documents for understanding. BARS-style budgets focused on inputs, not on the programs or outcomes citizens desired. BARS did not require jurisdictions to state their service objectives and few attempted to do so. Elected officials with a detailed grasp of BARS often had the ability to move resources around to further their policy goals with little accountability for those goals, because citizens lacked the tools to 'follow the money.

With new ways of "doing government" have come new ways of budgeting for government. The detailed accounting budgets of old have been cast into appendices and replaced by "service oriented" budgets focused on what programs and services municipalities provide. These budgets focus more on outcomes than inputs and relate the level of government service provided to a variety of measures. In the best examples of these budgets, cost and quality standards are set and measured over time. An example using emergency medical services might be providing measures of the cost, response time and effectiveness (e.g., the ratio of cardiac arrest cases to lives saved).

Washington's Growth Management Act (GMA), passed in 1990, encouraged this shift in budgeting. GMA included the concept of concurrency, which means that before development can be permitted, the infrastructure necessary to service the development must be planned and funded by the municipality. This GMA requirement took the historic mandate for six-year street plans and extended both the time frame and the scope. Municipalities responded with plans that included the estimated cost of new investment, the cost of re-investment to improve decaying assets and revenue sources to pay for the improvements. Recent additions to these plans go yet a step further to show the projected future impacts of new facilities on operating budgets.

Developing these newer kinds of budgets also tends to use different processes. These processes last longer, usually beginning with civic discussions focused on goals. Often these discussions begin at annual council retreats, followed by a series of public budget workshops on how and at what cost the community goals can be attained. Finally, councils direct that certain ideas be included in the upcoming year's budget.

These changes are important. The new style budgets provide significantly more information to the public. No longer focused on columns and rows of accounting data, budgets today contain much more narrative and describe what the elected policy makers expect their executive departments to deliver. The new emphasis on process permits civic debate on government services well before public expenditures are made and further allows decision-making with improved understanding regarding cost, quality and delivery. A downside to the increased amount of process is that going through the full budget development process is more time-consuming and expensive. For this reason, many governments have moved to biennial budgeting.

The Trustees of the Municipal League recognize the progress made by leading local governments in improved budget reporting and the improved accountability and opportunity for civic dialog that come with these budgets. We intend in this study to focus on how the public budget can be used by good governments to communicate effectively with citizens, to provide the means for evaluating government accountability, and ultimately, to develop stronger and healthier communities through an on-going dialog about values, objectives and how to achieve them.

This study thus attempts to develop a framework for evaluating budget documents from a citizen's perspective. The framework is applied to two years (a biennium) of budget documents by five jurisdictions. Our objective was to focus on what jurisdictions are doing well, and why, and places where improvements could be made. The study has also been intended to prototype an evaluation methodology that could be generally useful to citizens and could be used by them to evaluate other jurisdictions than those studied here.

As noted above, BARS is the mandated accounting system for government accounting and has, in the past, been the typical method of displaying budget information. We expect the presentation of data from government accounting and management systems to be accurate, complete and fair in their presentations. We do not expect to see a listing of page after page of numbers. Funds, subfunds and accounts are accounting devices for internal management and tracking. To the extent that jurisdictions must budget by allocating monies to narrowly categorized funds, our belief going into this study has been that such BARS-formatted data need to be translated into programmatic or service delivery terms focused on the outputs delivered to citizens, not inputs.

First, it should communicate with interested lay people about what the jurisdiction is doing and plans to do. This means a budget should no longer be thought of as an arcane document, the province of bureaucrats and politicians. One should be able to bring ordinary civic curiosity and some time to the budget and be rewarded with an understanding of the jurisdiction, what it is planning and how it is performing.

This means the information should be presented clearly and understandably. Tables of numbers are best when augmented with graphics and narrative to explain and elucidate their meaning. The responsibility for effective communication, thus, rests squarely on the jurisdiction and its budget writers.

Second, the budget document should communicate a clear picture of the jurisdiction. Included should be the basics: How is the jurisdiction organized? What services does it perform and why? How does it relate to its community and to other jurisdictions (e.g., through contracting arrangements)?

Additionally, the budget should provide a sense of the vision, values and the focus of the people setting the agenda. It should explain where the jurisdiction is going, what philosophy of service delivery its elected officials and managers are pursuing, and how municipal expenditures will translate into the community's vision for itself.

Finally, the budget document should be the basis for governmental accountability. No other public document illustrates so clearly what a government intends to do. Politicians may orate, councils may legislate, but it has long been recognized that the budget is the blueprint for future actions. While laying out publicly one's plans is the first part of accountability, measurement of results is then its other part. Quantifiable performance measures indicate whether a government is comparing its outcomes to past performance or to best practices elsewhere. If a budget document is able to describe and to measure how public funds are being used to deliver services, citizens can be confident that their government is doing what the community wants.

For this study and to test our, prototype evaluation framework, the Municipal League Foundation decided to include a limited set of budgets that could help test our ideas on good budgets and help develop the methodology, demonstrating the validity or difficulties with evaluation.

Consequently, we chose to look at the budgets of five major King County jurisdictions with different missions and scopes, which gave us the opportunity to examine a variety of different kinds of budgets. We chose to examine three cities (the three largest cities in King County - Seattle, Bellevue and Federal Way) and two regional special-purpose districts, the Port of Seattle and Sound Transit.

By choosing to focus on the largest cities, we expected to see the most sophisticated and professional budget documents and yet also to see a range of different approaches to providing and communicating financial information. In fact, we found that Seattle, Bellevue and Federal Way have widely different budgets that reflect different structures (Seattle has a strong mayor/strong council form of government, while Bellevue and Federal Way have city manager forms) and different management philosophies on the part of their executives and councils. Some of those differences are highlighted later in this report in the discussion of our findings.

By selecting the budget of the Port of Seattle we were able to look at a public entity that operates in a quasi-private marketplace and has adopted various private sector reporting mechanisms. By selecting Sound Transit, a new government created by voters to implement a massive capital program, we were able to look at innovative techniques for accountability to voters in reporting on capital projects. The differences in their missions are strongly reflected in their budgets and are also discussed later in this report.

Every municipality and special purpose district is required by law to prepare and publish a budget to communicate to citizens what its revenues will be and how it will spend the public's money.

Some public entities use the budget as a tool to provide detailed insight into their operations and their capital programs. Such budget documents educate and communicate, but beyond that, they also create trust and accountability because they fully disclose everything a curious and involved citizen might want to know. Other governments, however, prepare budgets that meet the minimum requirements of the law without actually communicating much at all. They are frustrating and often obfuscating to the individual trying to learn about a jurisdiction's operation.

Budgets are the fundamental documents for governmental accountability. A budget should articulate the vision of the elected representatives of the government: their values and goals. These should be articulated in a concrete enough fashion that individuals within the communities served can understand and engage in a meaningful dialog about the appropriateness of the values and goals and the government's success or failure in achieving them. And they should be articulated in meaningful ways to the community.

In this study, we have tried to evaluate five jurisdictions' budgets in two distinct ways: first on a set of criteria which describe what we believe are basic requirements for adequate communication and accountability; and second, by a more qualitative summary view of what constitutes an effective budget from the point of view of an interested citizen spending an hour with the jurisdiction's published document. The results of our analysis can be found in the Study Findings section of this report, summarized into broad themes that discuss excellent practices we found as well as practices that hindered our ability to understand the jurisdiction in question.

Following is the summary version of the evaluation framework we developed and applied. A more detailed version listing the specifics of what we looked for is found in the attachment to this report. It is important to note that we did not consider all of these criteria to be equally important, but rather they represent a checklist of items we looked for in each budget. Another disclaimer to be noted is that we did not review the separate capital budgets or CIPs of the five jurisdictions. We did look for and evaluate capital project information available in the main budget document.

We found that each of the five jurisdictions we evaluated provides a reasonably complete picture of what it does, how it is organized, what revenues it takes in and how it allocates resources. In keeping with the Northwest's general reputation for "clean" and progressive government, each jurisdiction, to a greater or lesser degree, is moving toward outcome-based budgeting and toward more involvement of, and communication with, its citizens in setting its spending priorities. Thus, accountability and public process get generally high marks in all five of these jurisdictions' budgets.

That said, some jurisdictions do better than others in the clarity of the message communicated, the organization of information for ease of use, and the general readability of their documents.

Highlights of especially effective budget practices we found included, for the three city budgets we reviewed:

City of Bellevue. Bellevue's budget (and apparently its management practice) has by far the most thorough and completely developed system of performance or outcome measures of any of the jurisdictions. For each department of city government, metrics and objectives are clear and easy to find, and it is easy to link spending priorities to management objectives. Additionally, Bellevue has developed a short-form - or executive summary - version of its budget that captures all of the essential budget information in a brief 44 pages of narrative, charts and graphs, organized in a systematic and highly user-friendly manner.

 

City of Federal Way. Federal Way's budget did an excellent job of communicating in its introductory budget message the city's philosophy of government, its approach to evaluating taxing and spending proposals, and its priorities for enhancing quality of life in its community.

City of Seattle. Seattle's budget did the best job of describing its revenue base, both its history and forecast, as well as laying out individual tax sources with their rates and revenue yields.

For the two special purpose districts, we found that their strong points clearly reflected their unique individual missions:

Sound Transit. Sound Transit (also known as the Regional Transit Authority) has a highly developed system for tracking and reporting on its many capital projects. This is due to its voter mandate to deliver on time and on budget several hundred individual capital projects, as well as its commitment to a complex subarea tracking and reporting system for revenues and expenditures. Unique among the budgets we reviewed, Sound Transit shows original estimates for each project, compared to current project costs, as well as operating cost implications of each capital project.

Port of Seattle. The Port has a sophisticated way of measuring return on its assets and using target returns as a performance measure against which it strives to improve. While the quasi-private nature of many of the Port's operations make this easier to do than it is for other governmental entities, there was an impressive linkage between these metrics and the management initiatives described.

Following are characteristics of the most effective budgets that made our job of reviewing and quickly understanding each jurisdiction easier and more complete. Also cited are a few less welcome features we found in some of the budget documents we examined.

An Introductory Budget Message

It is most welcome to open the budget document and find near the beginning a letter from the chief executive officer of the jurisdiction, summarizing its key themes, issues and initiatives in simple terms understandable to the citizen. Most of the budgets we reviewed had such a message and did a good job of laying out how local needs and trends and elected official policy direction had been translated into administrative initiatives. The messages did not, however, do as good a job in clearly linking the identified initiatives and priorities to the level of resources allocated.

Only one jurisdiction, the City of Seattle in its final adopted 1997-98 budget document, had no budget message, but instead listed numerous technical "statements of legislative intent" that were difficult to understand and addressed to the administrative officials of the city rather than to the general audience of citizens.

A Budget Summary in Narrative and Other Form

When communicating budget information, it is easy to be too detailed and technical or, on the other hand, too general and lacking in substantiating backup information. The best budget summaries address this issue by providing some figures and graphs along with narrative statements explaining what the numbers mean. The worst summaries create confusion by making narrative statements that appear to be contradicted by the numbers or graphs. Clarity, consistency and multiple formats for expressing information were most effective.

Historical and Future Context

Situating the current budget in a historical pattern or trend as well as in a forecasted future helps the reader to understand the context of the current fiscal environment. Are revenues growing at a faster, slower or same pace as in the recent past? Are forecasted needs growing at the same rate? Is the discretionary general fund money (as opposed to dedicated sources that can be used only for specific purposes) expected to grow at the same rate as anticipated spending needs? While all jurisdictions show some years of historical trend in revenues and expenditures and some forecasted revenues, none of the jurisdictions provided complete contextual information, both historical and future, to show revenues and expenditures in relationship to each other and to the current budget.

Additionally, some budgets showed absolute dollar amounts over a number of years without indicating percent change year-to-year or real (inflation-adjusted) change for ease of comparison. Dollar figures alone over several years offer data only and little in the way of communication.

Presentation of Expenditure Data

As stated above, we found that all five of the jurisdictions are describing their programs and programmatic objectives reasonably well. What they are not doing well yet is providing expenditure information on a program basis, so that a reader could determine the cost of providing a specific service or function. In most cases expenditure data are broken out by department and by major divisions within departments, so that it is possible to determine how much is being spent in a broad functional area, but then within the department or division, the old-style BARS data are again the prevalent format.

For example, one budget for a parks and recreation department listed teen programs, athletic programs, aquatics and arts and special events as some of the specific service offerings, but then proceeded to provide expenditure data for the entire department by categories such as salaries, benefits, professional services and operating supplies. If a citizen wanted to know the cost of the teen programs or the arts programs in the same way that other products purchased by consumers have single defined costs, that information would not be available in the budget. Access to such information would be of benefit to citizens looking to assess program effectiveness or value to the community,

Outcome Measures

Each of the jurisdictional budgets reviewed indicated some degree of progress toward measuring and reporting performance in quantifiable outcome measures. Some jurisdictions had been measuring outcomes for some years and had a history of improved performance to report along with goals they were working toward (Bellevue). Other jurisdictions were in the process of developing objectives, but still had little in the way of quantifiable metrics that were used to improve services or allocate resources (Seattle).

In examining the various measures used, especially on a departmental level, it became apparent that some measures do not truly evaluate performance, but simply quantify workload. For example, if a public information department reports that it issued 700 press releases in one year, 25% more than in the previous year, that appeared to us to be an attempt to quantify something for its own sake rather than to measure the effective delivery of services to the public.

Linkage of Program Expenditures and Outcomes

All budgets contained significant weaknesses in the linkage between program expenditures (operating and capital) and stated objectives. On the operating side, how are fund allocations intended to help meet a stated performance target such as an improvement in productivity or service quality? Budgets stated in their introductory messages their priorities and areas of emphasis but did not state how resources were to be used to meet those objectives.

On the capital side, little attention seems to be placed on the connection between capital projects and specific community objectives. For example, elected officials may have set a goal of establishing a certain number of acres of open space per capita, a goal that requires the acquisition of acreage over time. The current year's spending toward meeting that goal is rarely indicated. Also, seldom is a linkage made between the capital budget and implications for the future operating budget. For example, do major investments in new parks increase the demand for future operating resources or does the investment in the Port's new runway improve the ability to meet a performance target? Few capital budgets provide these kinds of linkages, instead they do little more than show what is to be spent on a project.

Comparison to Other Jurisdictions

Some of the budgets we examined included data comparing themselves with other jurisdictions on such indicators as property tax rates, business, utility and sales tax rates, number of employees and demographics of the jurisdiction. Interestingly, no budget showed the respective jurisdiction in comparison to another on an indicator on which it did not fare well. It is very easy for a city to make itself look good by claiming to have a lower tax rate or fewer employees than its similar-size neighbors, if its government provides fewer services or has a much higher tax base. These kinds of explanatory factors however are almost never included in the comparative charts. Comparisons are thus often quite misleading because they do not compare like things and when used in this fashion are self-serving and dishonest. Comparisons with other jurisdictions should be dispensed with unless they are being used as benchmarks to improve performance.

In summary, the Municipal League found that the budget documents of the jurisdictions we reviewed are generally doing a good job of communicating their broad goals and spending initiatives and the rationales for those initiatives; the budgets are well-organized with introductory messages, tables of contents, and separate sections for summary information and detailed backup data; additionally, the budgets all make varying attempts to be reader-friendly by using narrative and graphical information in addition to numbers.

But there is room for improvement in a number of areas. We would encourage governments to move further toward providing information about the cost of services delivered, as opposed to simply listing expenses in the spending categories. Public dialog regarding what governments are doing must be informed by the cost of delivering services compared to the value obtained.

We would also encourage officials to continue to develop service objectives and outcome measures that are meaningful expressions of service quality and effective management. Those outcome measures should then be linked, for both operating and capital programs, to the choices about fund allocation that are embedded in the budget. With this information, citizens can participate more fully in discussions of how we should use scarce public resources.

Finally, the Municipal League believes that local governments can make a significant contribution to reconnecting with citizens by providing excellent communication and a high degree of accountability. While the jurisdictions studied for this report were all large and relatively well-funded. we do not believe that smaller jurisdictions are handicapped by their lesser resources. By clearly outlining their vision and goals, the services they provide, and their intent and means of using the public's money more effectively to improve services, governments can demonstrate responsiveness and responsibility toward the communities - and citizens - they serve.

Attachment

This attachment lists the details of the framework developed for evaluating public budgets.

Two cautions are worth noting. We did not consider all of the criteria listed to be equally important, but rather they represent a checklist of items we looked for in each budget. Also to be noted is that we did not review the separate capital budgets of the five jurisdictions evaluated, though we did look for and evaluate capital project information available in the main budget documents.

I. Jurisdiction Overview

Elected Officials

What we looked for: Each budget should identify who should be held accountable for the values, objectives and plans outlined by the budget. In our system, this is the legislative authority for the jurisdiction (the city council, port commissioners or directors), and for those jurisdictions with an elected executive (a strong mayor, for example) the executive and the legislative both. Citizens should find it easy to identify these decision-makers and be able to engage with them in public dialog.

What we rated on:

• Ease of finding the names of the elected officials
• How to contact them, addresses and phone numbers
• The term of office for each elected official

Organization and Staffing Chart

What we looked for: An understanding of how the government has structured itself to deliver services, and how and to whom accountability is distributed.

What we rated on:

• Is there an overview chart describing the structure of the jurisdiction? Is it understandable to the lay reader?
• Are there similar charts for major subdivisions of the jurisdiction?
• Do these charts relate to the programs of the jurisdiction? That is, can one relate the services and programs delivered to structure and accountability?

Government Functions

What we looked for: Clear articulation of the service model for the jurisdiction. Which services are provided using an in-house delivery model? Where are services contracted or jointly delivered using a cooperative model? What metrics are used to determine the quality and cost of the services? (For example, if a jurisdiction is not providing its own police or fire services, who is, and how are they being held accountable?)

What we rated on:

• Which services are provided in-house? Which services are provided through other delivery models? What metrics are used to evaluate programs and services?

Process Overview

What we looked for: Clear articulation of what steps and what time line the jurisdiction uses to develop its basic goals, priorities and its budget.

What we rated on:

• What is the process the executive and legislative use for developing priorities?
• Where does the budget fit into the process?
• What is the timeline for the process, including opportunities for citizen input?

II. Policies and Priorities

Trends and Issues

What we looked for: A clear description of the degree to which the jurisdiction sees where it is today in the context of prior budgets and present and future challenges.

What we rated on:

• Is there a long-run perspective on trends affecting the jurisdiction?
• Is there a description of what the jurisdiction views as its challenges?

What we looked for: Language articulating how the jurisdiction proposes to deal with the challenges it has identified and how it proposes to achieve its objectives. Why were these initiatives proposed rather than some alternative set and how do they relate to the values and goals of the jurisdiction?

What we rated on:

• Are the initiatives clearly visible (either at the jurisdictional level, or within departments, if appropriate)?
• Does the budget identify who is accountable for the initiative?

Performance Measures/Outcome Costing

What we looked for: Descriptions of services and measures showing what is delivered, at what cost, with historical comparisons. For example, a city may have a roads maintenance department responsible for maintaining so many miles of roads. A cost per mile for maintenance could be reported, along with standards for maintenance. History and forecasts would provide context.

What we rated on:

• Are outcomes defined?
• Are measures of cost and quality provided?
• Are the measures provided for several years of history, and forecast for the budget period?

Financial Policies

What we looked for: A general description of the jurisdiction's financial policies, for example, on setting fees, raising taxes or using debt to finance capital facilities.

What we rated on:

• Does a section of the budget describe the financial policies?
• Are the policies clear and understandable?
• Do they relate to the decisions made within the budget (both operating and capital)?

III. Budget Summary

Quantitative Summary

What we looked for: An introductory quantitative summary of the budget's financial data. The summary should help the reader understand the finances of the jurisdiction at a high level, and provide a context for more detailed departmental and programmatic data.

What we rated on:

• Is there a tabular summary of the budget, clearly identifying the revenues and expenditures of the jurisdiction?
• Are there graphics illustrating proportions, trends of major categories of cost and revenue?

Narrative Summary

What we looked for: An introductory narrative summary of the budget's financial data, highlighting major economic trends and developments, changes from previous years and issues facing the jurisdiction. The summary should help the reader understand the finances of the jurisdiction at a high level, provide a context for the policy choices made in the budget as well as for the more detailed departmental information. An overview of how the budget is structured was also helpful.

What we rated on:

• Is there a narrative summary of the budget, including highlights of revenue sources and major areas of resource allocation?
• Does it include major features and comparisons, including changes from prior periods?

Financial Forecasts

What we looked for: A sense of where the jurisdiction thinks it is headed. Governments are charged with anticipating future service needs and planning for and maintaining infrastructures with very long useful lives, yet which require on-going maintenance and, eventually, major refurbishment. Does the jurisdiction indicate its plans for meeting these responsibilities?

What we rated on:

• Does the budget contain revenue and expenditure forecasts?
• Do the forecasts contain capital investment and re-investments?

IV. Budget Detail

What we looked for: Narrative and tabular information on where the jurisdiction gets its money, including revenue sources and yields for major operating and capital sources. We expected grants and non-operating sources to be detailed separately, as jurisdictions have less control and certainty with grants. We also looked for other revenue sources being no more than a small percentage of the total. Revenues listed here should also be the basis for financial forecasts found elsewhere in the budget.

What we rated on:

• Are data provided on rates of taxes and fees, yields for major revenue sources?
• Is there a table of revenues by source?

Detail of Operating Expenditures

What we looked for: Descriptions of the types of expenditures the jurisdiction makes by department and by program. Generally we expected to see clear indications of the cost of providing the program or service, presented in tabular form and including narrative discussion of objectives, new initiatives and any changes proposed.

What we rated on:

• Are detailed program expenditures shown?
• Is there a narrative summary of objectives, initiatives?

Comparison to Previous Years

What we looked for: For both revenues and expenditures, we expected to see comparisons with previous years, both in tabular and narrative forms. We looked for percentage changes year to year and descriptions of significant trends or increases or decreases. We also looked for indications of the effect of inflation on the trend over time.

What we rated on:

• Are tabular comparisons available for a number of years prior to the budget period?
• Are figures shown in nominal and real (inflation-adjusted) dollars?
• Is there narrative describing changes over time?

BARS Accounting Detail

What we looked for: We noted if BARS detail is prominently included in the budget document while programmatic expenditures are not. While required by law, our experience has shown that detailed break-downs of salaries, benefits, supplies and equipment are not useful for citizens in understanding how public money is spent. Rather, citizens are concerned about the total costs to provide various services so they can engage in meaningful dialog about choices and trade-offs.

What we rated on:

• How is it handled?

Summary and Detail of Capital Expenditures

What we looked for: Summaries of the capital plans by department or program. We looked for these to be grouped into departmental or programmatic capital projects with an indication of the jurisdiction's high-level investment strategies. We also looked for listings of major capital investments by project, including project description, total cost and any phasing. We looked for narrative describing the projects and their context, such as community objectives, anticipated outcomes and potential impacts on future operating expenditures and revenues. Further, we looked for metrics, or quantifiable outcomes such as return on assets or measures such as reduced congestion or improved response time. We did not expect to see every individual capital project listed unless the operating and capital budgets are a single document.

What we rated on:

• Is there a tabular project summary by department, listing total costs and expenditures by year?
• Is there a narrative description of the jurisdiction's investment strategy?
• Are estimates of annual impacts of the project on operating costs included?
• Are project descriptions provided?
• Are project metrics included?

V. Summary Evaluation

Accessibility and Ease of Use

What we looked for: How easy was it to learn about the jurisdiction? Was the organization of the budget logical and quickly understandable? Were section layouts clear and easy to follow? Overall, did the budget effectively communicate the values, objectives, issues and initiatives of the local government?

What we rated on:

• Good integrated use of narrative, tabular and graphic presentation of data?
• Document structure easily understood and consistent?
• Clarity of directness of the vision of the jurisdiction?

Usefulness as Reference Document

What we looked for: How easily could specific questions be answered? How strong and consistent was the organization of the budget? Could the reader infer the location of information? Were there a table of contents and an index and were they useful in quickly finding information?

What we rated on:

• Overall structure well-organized?
• Consistency of presentation of information?
• Table of contents? Index?

Overall Impression

Our summary evaluation of how the jurisdiction's budget document relates to our criteria overall and to the most effective practices we found in other public budgets. The cumulative effect of all of the good and bad practices in a budget.