Funding What We Value

April 2009

Intro

At West Boylston’s April 15th Select Board meeting, the Town Administrator outlined the process and results for a recently conducted analysis to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to our community. During a five hour session with 17 volunteer residents, the Beaman Library surfaced as one of the top 3 community strengths. Ironically, the only residents to learn of these findings were the six library advocates in attendance to present a petition signed by hundreds of residents in support of the library, which remains zero-funded for FY2010.

The dissociation between funding and values also plays out at a national level. Last month the Washington Post reported that the audience for National Public Radio (NPR) is growing while audience share for commercial news and radio outlets is in decline. According to NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, the audience for its weekend show, Wait wait… don’t tell me! is twice as large as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report combined. Nevertheless, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting budget has come under legislative assault for years, despite the obvious value Americans place on public broadcasting.

How can we remedy this disconnect? For starters, we need more focus, organization, information and participation.

Focus

I applaud our town leaders for initiating the SWOT analysis. In fact, an annual survey of resident values, needs and preferences should become standard governing practice. A successful survey would be:

• Thoughtful – concise & well-organized with questions that make sense.
• Comprehensive – one survey covering all departments rather than multiple surveys from individual departments.
• Timely – West Boylston’s town elections are in March and its town meeting is in May. A survey in April might help create civic momentum and inform residents and our newly-elected officials about community priorities in advance of the town meeting.
• Heavily promoted – in advance using multiple communication channels to increase the response rate.
• Online – using one of many free, quality survey tools with built-in analysis capabilities. Residents without internet access could be encouraged to use the free broadband access at the Beaman Library to complete the survey.
• Analyzed rapidly – with results published via the same communication channels used to promote the survey.

Focusing on what we value is the vital first step toward funding what we value.

Organization

Conventional municipal budget & reporting practices make it difficult to answer simple questions like “How much of our annual budget is allocated to [insert department name or expense line here]?”

In West Boylston, for example, health insurance costs and debt service fall into two general buckets and are not linked back to the originating departments. Fuel expense for all town vehicles is combined in a line item within the DPW budget. Some departments list expenses individually within their budgets and some lump them together under “purchased services”. And the schools, which comprise a huge portion of the town’s budget, operate outside the budget process required for every other town department.

I share this not to disparage the fiscal management in West Boylston; indeed, I am quite impressed by our Town Administrator’s knowledge of municipal management, his handle on our finances and his willingness to share information. What I’m faulting is the legacy system of chutes and ladders he must work within.

With so much at stake, it’s imperative that we develop financial systems that quickly provide answers to basic, factual questions about how we’re spending our money. Otherwise we’ll never know if we’re truly funding what we value.

Information

Given the availability of sophisticated, low-cost publishing tools, it is reasonable to expect better information from all levels of government. In this context, better means: integrated, timely, informative, personalized, interactive, and multi-channel.

• Integrated - it’s costly and ineffective for town departments to have individual websites. Municipal information needs to be available from a central, well-organized website that is easy for residents to use and town staff/volunteers to maintain.
• Timely - municipal websites must deliver valuable content daily and become a comprehensive repository for public information. “News” needs to be new. Meeting notices and minutes must be published promptly. Meaningfully archiving legacy content is vital for the near and distant future.
• Informative - Material posted to municipal websites including meeting minutes, town policies, etc. is often overly long, overly written and uninformative. It often foregrounds process versus progress (e.g.The meeting was called to order at 7:03 p.m. In accordance with chapter XVII, paragraph 6 ...). It’s time to update tradition and provide more concise and substantive info regarding the execution of our public business.
• Personalized - content that matches a resident’s interests should receive prominent placement for those who register on the webiste. A robust search capability is vital to help residents find information they need more quickly.
• Multi-media – text, images, audio and video can be used to communicate the vitality and richness of our community life.
• Interactive - participation is the life-blood of a strong community and the town website should make it easy for residents to bookmark & rate content, post comments and email a friend. The site must efficiently match volunteers with opportunities. Secure ecommerce to enable residents to pay tax bills, order tickets and merchandise, and make donations is also required.



• Multi-channel – town information needs be available when and how residents want to consume it. Some may want to visit the website and browse. Others may want new content sent via email or to a news reader. Content delivered via micro-blog throughout the day may be just right for a busy resident.

State and local websites generally fall short in these areas. Many rely on municipal website design consultants that have not kept pace with advances in communication technologies and best practices. To compound the problem, many organizations that evaluate government websites are also behind the times and do more to reify the status quo than extend it.

Participation

Participation is key to achieving the focus, organization and information needed to help ensure our public funding is aligned with our values. Citizens can (and should) lead the need to increase the responsiveness and accountability of our governing bodies.

We need to communicate clearly and constructively with our town officials so they’ll know what is important to us.

We need to volunteer on a rotating basis to report on town meetings and local events to help keep everyone in the community informed and engaged.

Community members with computing expertise need to donate consulting and training to help our municipalities become more administratively efficient and leverage technology tools that promote transparency and communication.

We need to offer whatever skills and talents we have to strengthen our community—for ourselves and for our neighbors.

And we need to speak out loudly, persistently and respectfully when we find our governance going off track and not supporting what we most value.

*Icons by Andrews Willis.