Walnut Creek Presents This Week at Transforming Local Government Conference - Breakthrough in Communicating the Budget to Citizens with PBB

This week the City of Walnut Creek, California, will present at the Transforming Local Government Conference - their award winning case study was selected by the Alliance for Innovation for it's breakthrough nature in communicating the budget effectively to its citizens.

 Congratulations Walnut Creek!!!

The City is among the earliest-adopters of Priority Based Budgeting, having first implemented the process in 2009. They first presented at the PBB conference last year in San Diego, and will be among the prominent case studies at this year’s Annual PBB Conference in Washington DC.

We wanted to share with you one of the most significant breakthroughs to date in the work – highlighting what the City has done on their own to transform the way they communicate about the budget with their citizens.

So many of us are working so hard to make headway in “authentic citizen

engagement.” It’s not easy! One of our fundamental objectives in creating the “unique lens” of Priority Based Budgeting was and continues to be offering a way to “see” the budget in a way that is so easy, so clear, any citizen, any elected official, any staff member, anybody could understand immediately how decisions are made. Not only that, but we want to make it so clear what decisions and what options are open to us; to provide clarity where it’s sometimes uncertain – that was much of the focus of our September article in Public Management Magazine.

This advancement from Walnut Creek offers such hope and excitement about what’s possible. The City is pioneering in so many ways, not just Priority Based Budgeting, and we encourage you to reach out to them (contact Assistant City Manager / Administrative Services Director, Lorie Tinfow at tinfow@walnut-creek.org).

With the “2012-2014 Budget Story,” we are so pleased to introduce to you yet another innovation from Walnut Creek!

“A Community Connected: The 2012-14 Budget Story,” seeks to share our budget

information in a new way. It identifies what we plan to do over the next two years with the resources placed under our stewardship. It explains the processes we’ve put in place with the community to set the goals that guided our budget decisions. And it tells our story in a way that we hope will be more engaging and easy to follow, using graphics, photos and short stories.”

 - City Manager, Ken Nordhoff, from Page 1: The 2012-2014 Budget Story