CC Minutes - 10/31/07 Work Session

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Mr. Pryor appreciated the effort to adopt a new way of budgeting. He supported the linkage of council goals to the budget. He agreed that the cheapest way of doing things was not always the best way; rather the focus should be on selecting services to budget for that provide the greatest ability to achieve a goal. He wanted to ensure that services were delivered in the way that best met the needs of the people of Eugene. Regarding public input, he strongly felt that the council needed to be mindful of which elements of it were appropriate to the process they were going through and which did not apply. Ms. Bettman asked which goals of the City were not being met. Ms. Murdoch replied that the City provided services under most of the council goals. Ms. Bettman surmised that the City was basically already fulfilling the goals. Ms. Murdoch affirmed that the City had programs that addressed each of the goals. Ms. Bettman opined that rhetoric around “this particular program” was like “religious zeal.” She felt it lacked substance. She asked how the proposed motion differed from the motion that was before the council on October 17. Ms. Jones responded that she was seeking council support to use the City Council’s five vision statements around which to align the City’s resources. She averred that the value and outcomes that were desired were not being stated, and the budget was not being aligned around the goals; it was being aligned by service outputs. Ms. Bettman felt that the motion was basically an endorsement of the program. She thought a piece of the motion had been left out, which was the presentation of the budget. She had a lot of concerns about showing up for the FY09 budget process with “a completely different document.” She declared that there would be no way to compare historic revenue expenditures with future revenue expenditures given the new format. She asked if it would be possible to move forward with the same budget document. Ms. Murdoch responded that the service budget would appear different because the City would not be aligning it in the same way. She said there may be services that serve two goals that would be split, but most of the document would remain as it is today. She pointed out that the City had an award-winning budget document and the City valued that it communicated well with the councilors, Budget Committee, and the community. She underscored that the budget, once completed, would be understandable and would be more transparent than before. Ms. Bettman reiterated her feeling that it would be problematic to have a document that would not track historic expenditures. She averred that there were school boards in Minnesota and labor unions in Iowa who had objected to this kind of program. She felt that if it was a good program the City did not need to move on it “in a truncated manner” and could defer the change to FY10. Ms. Jones thought one of the primary reasons to move forward with this program was that she had heard “for years” the desire to have more input into the budget process earlier and she had heard questions about how the City defined the things that were in the budget. She reiterated that she could have undertaken this process, directed staff to implement this procedure, and have gone through all of the steps and returned with a budget that would answer the questions it was legally required to answer. Instead, she said, she preferred to choose to communicate with the council on anything she would consider to be a change in the budget process in order to get the feedback on the vision statements. She wanted to move forward with the council’s support for those statements. She stressed that the City had to do something different other than a status quo budget because the forecast mandated that the City would not be able to continue to do “business as usual.” She underscored that it was important to her that the council understood that this was how the resources would be aligned; all of the other things were “irrelevant.” She pointed out that she could have easily chosen not to undertake this change given that she was serving in an interim position and that it would MINUTES—Eugene City Council October 31, 2007 Page 5 Work Session