2023 Annual Conference Sessions: Budgeting and Forecasting
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Sessions for Sunday, May 21
Rethinking Public Engagement for Budgeting
For decades, finance officers and governments have recognized the need to improve public engagement in the budget process. Public engagement is often limited to a public hearing or two, which typically happens after important decisions have been made and often amount to little more than a chance for people to air grievances. GFOA's Rethinking Public Engagement initiative brought together top experts from across the country to take a fresh look at public engagement. In this session, you will hear about key lessons learned and how you can get involved in a cohort of local governments that will work towards better public engagement in their communities.
Smarter School Spending: Navigating the Intersection of Instructional Goals and Finance
School districts are charged with providing free and appropriate education to all students and must do so with a lack of resources and a strategic plan that outlines instructional goals; however, in order to ensure that the limited funds are spent in support of these objectives, finance officers from school districts need to go beyond the strategic plan and implement a long-term financial plan and budgeting practices that promote student achievement. GFOA’s Smarter School Spending project and the Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting provide a framework to enhance school district budgeting and prepare governments to better align strategic goals, student outcomes, and resource allocation.
Sessions for Monday, May 22
No Easy Answers: Risks, Uncertainty, and Reserves.
Governments are subject to financial shocks, including natural catastrophes, recessions, and more. Financial reserves (a “rainy day” fund) are essentially a form of self-insurance that governments use to buffer themselves against these risks. But what are the risks governments should be concerned about? What size of reserves is appropriate to cover risks? What opportunities are there to use commercial insurance to help cover these risks? Speakers in this session will answer these questions and more. Attendees will leave with resources and strategies to apply risk-aware and risk-savvy thinking to reserves in their own organizations.
Smarter School Spending: Using Analytical Reviews
GFOA’s Best Budgeting Practices for School Districts framework includes tools to help analyze, assess, and prioritize instructional goals. This session will provide an overview of cost savings options, initiatives inventories, and Academic Return on Investment (AROI). Attendees will learn how to use these tools to ensure that their school district's limited funds are spent to support its strategic goals.
Leadership Workshop – Common Sense Improvements to the Budget Process
The budget process is often referred to as the most consequential in government. However, many staff in government find the steps that organizations go through to create the budget as time consuming, confusing, and outdated. Worse, many approach the process as an experience to survive missing out on great opportunities to innovate and collaborate. Fortunately, there is a better way and all finance officers can learn simple strategies for process improvement that can be applied to their budget process. In this session, join Brian Elms in an interactive workshop to break down key components of the budget process and apply proven process improvement strategies to eliminate waste, achieve better outcomes, and become a leader (and hero) in your organization.
Interactive leadership workshops are limited to 250 individuals per workshop and requires pre-registration.
The Budget Officer as Decision Architect: Designing the Decision-Making Environment
Government leaders make decisions for a living. With good decision making, they can greatly improve the lives of their constituents and further their own careers. But decision making is messy. It is often done by groups, so there are conflicting points of view. It is usually time constrained, so there isn’t time to consider everything. There is always uncertainty, usually more than we realize. And it is done by humans, so it comes with the myriad of well-documented psychological biases. Finance officers can help their organization make better decisions by "architecting" the decision-making environment. In this session, we will discuss the key skills of a decision architect, how finance officers have used them, and how you can build them.
Forecast with Confidence: Improving Your Skills to Make Better Decisions for Your Government
Forecasting is a foundational part of budgeting and financial planning. Forecasts allow public officials to anticipate future resource availability and plan accordingly and are essential for developing budgets that are balanced and affordable. Longer-term forecasts analyze the financial sustainability of existing policies and programs and provide warning of potential imbalances. A forecast can also be used to create a shared basis for discussion of what the fiscal future might look like and what actions can be taken to change the future. In this session, we will discuss the skills you need to make the best forecasts in the time you have available. We'll also discuss how forecasting practices can be adapted to volatile and uncertain environments.
Sessions for Tuesday, May 23
Politics in Budgeting: Don't Hate the Player, Don't Hate the Game, Change the Game
Budgeting is a political process. "Politics" is often considered a dirty word in our profession, but the finance officer needs to not just survive a political environment, but thrive in it. This can be done without succumbing to the worst aspects of politics. In this session we will talk about common political power plays the finance officer might encounter, the sources of the finance officer's own political power, and how to ethically exercise that power and redirect potentially destructive political impulses to more productive outcomes.
Behind the Scenes: Practical Lessons Learned in Budgeting for Equity
Many governments are taking an interest in “budgeting for equity,” which means allocating resources to address unfair disparities between different groups of people, such as racial groups or income groups. Budgeting for equity is important because it is the ethical duty of government budget officials to develop a budget that is fair. In this session, you'll hear about the practical tensions that governments must navigate to introduce an equity lens to budgeting, including lessons learned from Results for America's City Budgeting for Equity and Recovery program.
What Does It Take to Rethink Budgeting?
The typical budget process is based on line items and historical precedent. While this does have some advantages, it also has a host of disadvantages that have long been recognized. Those disadvantages are becoming more acute as our society evolves. Many intrepid finance officers have explored new ways of doing budgeting and GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting project is providing guidance for creating a budget differently. But what does it take for a local government to change the way it budgets and plans? In this session, we'll discuss what GFOA research is finding and hear from practitioners who are challenging the long-held status quo to rethink their own budgets and discover potential for a better process that provides stronger outcomes.
Finance on Fire: Overcoming Issues with Budgeting for Fire Services
Ever feel like you and your colleagues in the Fire Department just aren't speaking the same language? If so, you're not alone, and this session is for you. GFOA and the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) are working together to develop resources to promote better collaboration between finance officers and fire chiefs. This panel discussion will feature both finance officers and fire personnel talking about how to improve communication between these two departments and address the many challenges that make capital planning, budgeting, purchasing, and other areas of public finance uniquely difficult for the fire service.
From Theory to Practice: Applying Basics in Economics to Public Finance
Most government finance leaders are keenly aware of the impact regional, national, and even international economic factors have on their community. Understanding those factors and applying basic principles of economics can help finance officers make decisions related to budgeting, capital planning, economic development, investing, and more. This session will explore the skills used in government finance that draw from the economics profession and consider how deeper expertise in these areas could strengthen the government finance office.
Sessions for Wednesday, May 24
Better Days Ahead: Strategies for Financial Sustainability
Hoping for "better days ahead" is not an effective strategy to ensure financial sustainability, but for many governments, it has become the de facto sustainability strategy. Current challenges and emergencies take up too much of our energy. Growing uncertainty makes financial forecasting feel like a guessing game, and annual budgeting means we really only have to focus on one year into the future. It's enough to discourage even the most experienced finance officer. But, while we can't guarantee better days ahead for our communities, we can promote effective planning strategies that will put our communities on the path toward financial sustainability. Hear from practitioners who have implemented such strategies and are seeing benefits in their organizations.
Position Budgeting Amid the Hiring Crisis
Nearly all local governments are having difficulty filling vacant positions these days. Hiring challenges clearly affect a government's operations and ability to meet service level expectations, but they can also complicate the development of the budget by introducing new layers of uncertainty. Will we be able to fill all of our open positions? Will we have to increase starting salaries to attract candidates? Will we have to pay more in overtime to continue meeting service demands? How do we budget salary and benefit expenses for positions that remain vacant? This session will explore these questions and more and provide tips for developing a personnel budget that fits the realities of today's compensation and recruiting environment and is consistent with budgeting best practices.
