Redmond, WA Engages Community and Employees to Create a Solid Budget

The City of Redmond, Washington, Engages Community and Employees to Create a Solid Budget

By Mike E. Bailey

The City of Redmond, Washington, uses priority-based budgeting, which requires a lot of organizational energy — meaning the process starts early in the year and involves a lot of city staff as well as community input. Observers often ask if all this effort is worth it, and the answer is yes — although an explanation is necessary. This article illustrates how Redmond’s budget process is more about engaging the community and city employees in financial leadership; a solid budget is a great byproduct.

Employee-Level Leadership

Redmond’s biennial budget process starts by conducting an annual survey and other community outreach work, in an effort to stay grounded to what matters most to city residents and businesses. The budget is built around six community priorities that were identified in 2008, when this approach got underway. (Go to www.redmond.gov/budget to see the budget.) After gathering community input, the city turns to its employees.

For each budget cycle, six new cross-organizational employee teams — called “results teams” — are formed, comprising four individuals, all volunteers. One team member is designated to lead each team, for logistical and organizational purposes. The city’s most recent budget process is its fifth experience with this approach, and employee interest has grown consistently. The city tries to choose team members who aren’t from an area that will be the subject to any budget proposals (e.g., a police officer or fire fighter wouldn’t be assigned to the safety priority team). As a result, team members are exposed to parts of the organization they previously knew little about.

The first task of a results team is to define the high-level results the city should pursue for each assigned priority.1 To identify the intended results, team members conduct interviews, do research, review the community input, and then discuss what they’ve learned and how that should inform the results. The city also now has a useful knowledge library created from research done during the previous budget processes. Based on their research, the teams define the expected results in a strategy map or some type of illustration of the city’s role in each priority area.

The strategy maps inform those who have requested resources what goals and objectives will likely go forward. City staff members use this information, along with a narrative produced by the results team, to focus their budget requests. At this stage, the results teams provide feedback about the clarity of each budget request and how well the request aligns with city strategies, and other pointers. Requests are polished up, based on this feedback, and resubmitted to the results teams for a final review. This is when the teams make recommendations to the mayor (Redmond’s chief executive officer) about how much of

The City of Redmond’s priority-based budgeting process is more about engaging the community and city employees in financial leadership; a solid budget is a great byproduct.

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each budget proposal they would recommend for funding, and why.

The mayor confers with each team and then works to balance the preliminary budget that he will recommend to the city council. The mayor holds the department directors accountable for working as a team to build the best budget for the city — meaning that directors are expected to leave their departmental interests at the door and collaborate on a balance of budget proposals that responds most directly to the community input received and the recommendations of the results teams. This has not been easy, as most department heads are accustomed to working at getting as much budget money for their own departments as possible. Five budget cycles, however, have shown that this collaborative approach is not only possible also better than the budget battles of the past.

What Employees Learn

The process results in city-wide financial leadership by exposing participating employees to parts of the organization they weren’t familiar with and to the challenges of creating the budget. These employees are given a spending target, providing the same challenge the mayor and council have in balancing the budget across all the functions and priorities of the city.

Team members also learn to write budget proposals in a way that employees across the organization can understand. Each budget proposal therefore includes a logic model to illustrate how the individual results making up each proposal — defined by performance measures — will lead to the ultimate intended result and connect to the priority’s goals. This “plain English” approach has helped employees learn to describe, from a community perspective, the value they produce in their work. (This tactic has also spilled over into the performance measures themselves.) A less technical, more value-focused approach compliments the city’s efforts to describe the value of its services to the community.

Employees have taken a great deal of pride in their increased leadership roles. In the past, employees (and some leaders) just complained about the poor quality of decisions made in allocating resources. Now, they have a way to become directly engaged in the process, either by submitting budget proposals or participating in a results team. Sharing the responsibility for results that deliver value to the community has become a point of pride among Redmond employees.

Conclusions

Redmond set out to encourage leadership at every level within the organization as part of a high-performing organization initiative. An important first step was spreading the responsibility for developing the budget among a much larger contingent of city employees than in the past. Employees have risen to the task and now seek out the opportunity to become engaged in financial leadership through one aspect of the budget process or another. The city’s budget process is very time-intensive, but the overall benefit to the organization is a much more engaged workforce that understands how and why decisions are made, and are great ambassadors for the city’s budget in the Redmond community.

Note

1.This approach was recommended by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson in their book, The Price of

Government, Basic Books, 2006.

Mike E. Bailey is finance director for the City of Redmond, Washington. He has worked in local government finance since 1980 and is a former president of the Washington Finance Officers Association and past member of the GFOA Executive Board.

Originally published in Government Finance Review (www.gfoa.org).