The following short video of David Goldman, deputy city administrator and finance director for the city of Oak Harbor, Washington, was one of seven we filmed at the Government Finance Officers Association’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, between June 11 and June 13.

The previous videos, which were posted over the last couple of weeks, were with Zach Markovits vice president and local practice lead at Results for America, which you can view here, and with GFOA Executive Director Chris Morrill, which is available here. 

We will continue sharing each of those short videos over the coming weeks. 

In this one, Goldman, who is part of the GFOA Rethinking Budgeting Task Force, focuses on the some of the findings of the task force about the difference between budgeting in smaller and larger cities. Oak Harbor, population about 25,000, is located on Whidbey Island, nearby to Seattle.

A few highlights from the video:

• “I’ve noticed coming to a smaller city that people wear multiple hats. . . you might have somebody doing payroll but also doing accounts receivable. You might have the finance director also be the city clerk and have another job as well.”

• "Some of the concerns that we felt when we were looking at rethinking budgeting was the capacity. I mean, can smaller cities handle moving past your traditional incremental type of budget and towards (an) advanced type budgeting -- whether it be program budgeting; performance budgeting; priority-based funding and any number of different types of budgeting that are out there.”

• One advantage of working in the finance office of a smaller community is that “budget staff can meet with people and learn how they actually get things done. You can talk to folks and build trust and show them why we’re moving to a different type of budgeting; why we’re doing performance measurements; why we’re breaking things up into programs and a lot more.”

(In 2023, we also produced a number of filmed interviews at GFOA’s annual conference in Portland, which we ran as one big feature under the headline “Voices from the GFOA.”)

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