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Weekly UpdatesCongratulations, you finally have the budget completed! It is balanced, meets the needs of your citizens, addresses the priorities of your elected officials, keeps taxes low, pays for those rising health insurance costs, and maybe even provides a few dollars for employee raises. Through a painstaking budget process, you have built a financial plan that will turn public dollars into public services. It's a good budget, and a story worth telling. But how do you tell that story?
The Citizen's Guide to the Metro Budget is an expression of Metropolitan Nashville's customer-focused approach to providing better information in better ways to citizens and other stakeholders. It quickly makes budgetary information accessible to the public, using simple design techniques that are available to virtually any government with a Web site. In Nashville, the Citizen's Guide has expanded the audience for the Metro budget by more than 33 times--to more than 2,500 users.
The site uses the Internet to make government more transparent to its citizens. It describes the budget process, discusses plans and progress to advance Metro's priorities, shows how tax dollars work in the community, and provides easy access to departmental information on activities, performance, and finances. The site is designed for access from a dial-up modem, but has features that can take advantage of broadband speed. It is written between an eighth-grade to a 10th-grade reading level, but contains information useful to the public, elected officials, and administrators. This article describes how Nashville has used the Internet to enhance stakeholder understanding of and participation in the budget development process.
ABOUT NASHVILLE
The Metropolitan Government (Metro) is the consolidated city-county government for Nashville, Tennessee's capital and second most populous city. Metro has a strong mayor form of government, with the mayor, vice-mayor, and 40 Metropolitan Council members elected on a nonpartisan basis. The finance director, who serves at the pleasure of the mayor, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) are responsible for developing Metro's $1.3 billion budget and guiding the government's 55 agencies and elected officials through the budget preparation and approval process.
Metro's budget takes the form of an ordinance that is filed by May 25 and must be passed by June 30 for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Between these two dates, the recommended budget ordinance is supported by administration communications that include budget presentations, budget hearings, and the recommended budget book. After approval, the adopted budget is presented in a final budget book that is published in the summer or early fall.
THE CHALLENGE--AND THE SOLUTION
For many years, the primary communication device about the Metro budget has been the recommended budget book, a 500- to 800-page document printed at the end of May and distributed to the Council in early June for their use in budget hearings with Metro agencies. Because of constraints of cost, time, and its useful life, the recommended budget book is distributed only to the Council, certain Finance Department and agency personnel, the press, and a few locations for public inspection. Since the adopted budget always contains amendments from the recommended budget, a final budget book is published in August or September to describe the budget actually approved by the Council. At the same time, OMB publishes a 28-page budget-in-brief booklet that is often used when officials make budget presentations to public community groups.
The short timeframe for considering the budget gives the administration very little time for one-on-one interaction about the recommended budget with Council members, their constituents, and other stakeholders, most of whom have very limited public budgeting experience. Even when the mayor and the Council have similar priorities, the budget requires some level of mass distribution, as well as the ability for interested parties to find programmatic information on their own. Even though Metro's budget documents have received the GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for many years, a prudent marketing and information plan requires more than the traditional ability to download 10- to 20-megabyte Adobe PDF files of the complete budget books and ordinances. Until development of the Citizen's Guide, the budget was available only by downloading these large files or finding the rare printed documents.
In his first State of Metro address after being elected in 1999, Mayor Bill Purcell outlined this vision for Nashville: "As we move the technology of the city government into this century, we will include every resident. Every home and library computer can be a mini-courthouse. From reporting problems and needs to paying fees and fines, the average person can have access to their government 24 hours a day, 365 days a year." The new finance director and the new IT director shared an enthusiasm for electronic government. One of the first priorities brought to the new Metro-wide E-gov Committee was the Citizen's Guide to the Metro Budget. Other initiatives included the redesign and launch of the nashville.gov portal, an e-bid surplus property auction system, online vendor registration, and the NotiPHy public health emergency communication resource.
With the support of the E-gov Committee, OMB initiated a project to prepare a citizen-oriented budget presentation that would make budgetary information more readily available to stakeholders. The goal was to expand budgetary conversation to all interested stakeholders via Metro's Web site, thus facilitating access to budgetary information through improved navigation aids. This initiative complemented a separate project to reformat the budget book. By presenting less raw accounting detail and more program information in a condensed, readable format, Metro hoped to shift the focus of budgetary conversation from object-expenditure detail toward the results of resource allocation decisions.
SITE DEVELOPMENT
To develop the site, OMB assembled a diverse team that combined staff with number-crunching and communications skills with internal Web developers from the Information Technology Services Department and an external Web development vendor. The team also called on employees with special skills from other units as needed.
The process began in January 2002 with an off-site staff brainstorming session to find better ways to communicate budgetary information to the public via the Internet. Early conceptual work determined the direction of the site, and what its role and function would be in the budget process. Metro decided to focus on access to information--to get the biggest bang for the buck by providing stakeholders with access to appropriate levels of program, policy, and management detail without reinventing the wheel. Design work began in mid-February; by the end of May, both the Web site and the process required to load it had been thoroughly tested by the development team, OMB staff, and selected colleagues. On May 24, when the recommended budget book was sent to the printer, the same Acrobat files were tagged and loaded into the Web site's navigation system. The site was live to the public on May 28, a week before the printed book became available.
SITE CONTENT
As deployed, the site includes links to satisfy a wide range of stakeholder needs. This section describes a few of the most noteworthy features of the Citizen's Guide.
Summary Information. The "30,000-foot view" of the budget includes links to the mayor's annual State of Metro address, concise discussions of Nashville's priorities, an explanation of the budget process, pie charts showing where the money comes from by source and where it goes by function, and the finance director's budget presentation to the Council. Another link takes the user to a discussion of the capital improvements budget, which follows a process that is parallel to, but separate from, the operating budget process. Users with broadband connections can take advantage of links to streaming video of budget presentations and Council budget hearings. Links also lead to the OMB home page and Adobe PDF files of the budget book and ordinances. Finally, the "Contact Us" button offers a degree of interactivity by allowing users to make suggestions to and ask questions of OMB staff. Exhibit 1 shows what the main page of the Citizen's Guide looks like.
Budget Aids. The Citizen's Guide includes several features to help users better understand Nashville's budget process. An online glossary defines unfamiliar financial and budgetary terms, while a reader's guide describes how to use the site and read the printed budget book's departmental pages. The most recent enhancement is a narrated slide show describing the budget preparation process.
Departmental Information. Drop-down selection lists take the user to each department's operating and capital improvements budget. Each department's operating budget page includes an organization chart. Clicking on the boxes on the chart takes the user to that unit's pages in the budget book. Other links lead to pages that present the department's budget at a glance, budget highlights, performance measures, and capital improvements budget. Users can also find links to the department's home page and contact information for department management and budget staff, including e-mail links. Exhibit 2 is an example of a typical departmental page.
KEY ISSUES
As Nashville conceptualized the Citizen's Guide, the project team had to work through several key issues, including orientation, accessibility, ease of use, and speed. This section details how each of these issues was resolved.
Orientation. The first question was whether the site should facilitate access to the line-item detailed financial information on the government's enterprise business system. This option was not pursued because time constraints did not provide for a satisfactory way of getting detailed revenue and expenditure information from our enterprise business system through the Internet firewalls and to citizens in a non-technical format. In the end, we decided that the site should focus on access to major policy areas, not line-item accounting information.
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