City Controller Report: Budgeting for a Preferred Place

Posted by on June 6, 2003

[posted from Neighbors On Line Philadelphia]

City Controller Jonathan Saidel has issued a report calling for improvements in Philadelphia’s City Budget Process called, “Budgeting for a Preferred Place.”
You can access the report online:

http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/pr060304.htm

The Controller’s office summarizes the report as follows:

The Budgeting For a Preferred Place document identifies many reforms that can improve the budget system ways to encourage high performance and excellent service while reducing the cost of government and making the budget more useful to public managers, elected officials, and the citizenry. These reforms can establish a government that responds to performance-based incentives rather than less outcome-oriented incentives. By reducing the need for high taxes and improving service-delivery efforts and the overall quality of life, Philadelphia
can once again experience real and sustained growth. To focus government on high performance, the Controller’s Office recommends ten specific budgetary tools:
? Set goals
? Use benchmarks
? Link budget to performance measures
? Expand accountability
? Use activity-based costing
? Illustrate budget tradeoffs
? Create a rainy-day fund
? Use dynamic scoring

We have also added the report to the PhillyNeighborhoods http://phillyneighborhoods.org/
home page on to our page related to the City Budget.

http://www.phillyneighborhoods.org/Organizing-Phila/City_Budget/city_budget.html

And while we’re at it, the Philadelphia Tax Reform Commission also has a web site at http://www.philadelphiataxreform.org/

This, too, has been added to the PhillyNeighborhoods.org web site.

Ed Schwartz

Ed Schwartz, Institute for the Study of Civic Values, 1218 Chestnut St., Rm. 702, Philadelphia, Pa. 19107 215-238-1434 edcivic@libertynet.org