Bellevue resets budget policy with citizen-driven process

BELLEVUE is known for its fiscal stewardship — a fact reflected in the city's annual citizen survey that shows the city consistently ranking high in "customer" satisfaction, the city's strong municipal bond ratings, and the excellent peer reviews we receive from our professional accounting and other fiscal systems.

Over the past few years, the recession has had devastating effects on our businesses and households. Since government revenues typically lag the general economy, we knew the "hit" was coming for the city budget.

The first thing the city did was triage. We stood on the brakes with regard to spending. We implemented across-the-board spending cuts in all departments, froze hiring except for some public-safety and other positions deemed absolutely critical, and halted most discretionary spending.

The city's second response to the downturn has been much bolder.

Knowing that we could not rely solely on the short-term measures taken to respond immediately to the economic crisis, we decided a fundamental reset was needed in the way we developed our budget — the city's chief policy document.

So we did away with our traditional budget-development process focusing on individual departments. Instead, the city borrowed from a model used by some other municipalities, tweaking it to fit our own needs, and opted to build a budget based on customer outcomes.

These outcomes were identified by staff and the City Council based on our customer surveys, and focused on areas such as quality neighborhoods, a healthy environment, and a safe, caring and economically competitive community.

Under the city's new budget process, before an existing or new program or service can be funded, it must be submitted as a proposal by a department and aligned with a specific, desired outcome. Separate employee evaluation teams are charged with writing and then ranking the spending proposals depending on how each achieves the desired results within an outcome based on evidence and facts. In other words, the proposal has to precisely define what it is delivering in order to get funded.

As one might imagine, the new process has created some anxiety among employees, scores of whom are directly involved for the first time in developing the city's budget. It is a radical departure from the traditional, top-down budget-development method.

But we view Budget One as a major tool in our ongoing, broader initiative to become a learning organization, one where employees are continually challenging themselves to question what they do, why they do it and how much it costs.

To us, fiscal stewardship matters, and we are committed to using our customers' tax dollars wisely on a long-term and sustainable basis. That's what we expect our new budget process to provide us.

In our annual citizen survey, Bellevue has maintained a 97 percent "good" or "excellent" quality-of-life rating. And while our rating is tremendous, we equally cherish the high marks we typically receive by residents who say they are receiving good or excellent value for their tax dollar.

In our last survey, 87 percent of our residents polled fell into that category, with most saying the value they received was excellent.

To achieve a rating like this, and still maintain a "AAA" municipal bond rating by Standard and Poors, is good business in our book.