A little over a year ago, we wrote a column for Route Fifty about the remarkably ambitious host of efforts that Fort Worth, Texas was making to re-invent its budgeting processes, on eight fronts: including, as we wrote in the column, “implementing priority-based budgeting; improved use of data analytics and benchmarking; comprehensive planning; a strategic investment plan and bond program; departmental strategic planning; “sunrise” reviews; use of Lean Six Sigma principals; a Government Finance Officers Association Rethinking Budgeting fellowship; and strategic foresight studies done with the aid of futurists.
The day after the feature appeared, we got a note from a well-respected official in one of the nation’s largest counties who wrote to say that, while he was impressed at the city’s goals, he’d be surprised if it accomplished more than one or two of them. That got us to thinking about the many times when we write about a city, county or state that is embarking on an ambitious agenda and then never go back again to see what really happened when inertia meets momentum, and political power gets in the way of managerial progress.
We’ve complained over the years about the lack of follow through on new programs by the entities involved. So, this felt like a good time to put ourselves to the test. We forwarded an e-mail to ourselves at the time to remind us to check in with Fort Worth in a year to see what had happened in the intervening months.
The reason for our optimism last year was the city had an unusually collaborative ethos, with the city manager and the council working closely together and that it had a running start thanks to many years during which it had acidulously gathered data about many of its activities, which provided a powerful launching pad for the budgetary equivalent of a rocket ship to Mars.
Following, are some of the efforts that we highlighted a year ago, and the progress that’s been made. The purpose of this B&G Report isn’t so much to pat Forth Worth on the back or even to provide a model for other cities to follow, but rather to make the point that while it’s easy to be dubious about ambitious undertakings, with concerted effort they can be made to happen.
Back a year ago, for example, we wrote that phase one of the city’s efforts – notably priority-based budgeting (PBB) –involved three departments: police, human resources and transportation and public works. Today, there are nine: police, transportation and public works, human resources, development services, information technology, library, municipal court, environmental services, and neighborhood services.
From something close to a standing start a year ago, with the help of Resource X (now a division of Tyler Technologies), the city now has a full inventory of the programs and services it offers internally and externally and knows what it costs to provide them. “This is a level of programmatic transparency that we never achieved at the line-item level,” reports Cooke. “In police, for example, we guided the department through an intensive time study in order to allocate each position to its related program/service.
The process illuminated gaps in services and areas where resources were stretched thin, which led to decision packages (budget requests) that were submitted – and some approved – through the FY2025 budget process. Without the PBB program inventory and related data, police’s submissions would have been created and ranked differently.”
Another one of the city’s major efforts was to do comprehensive planning, and it’s moving forward on that front as well. “We’re in the process of doing our next comprehensive plan,” says Cooke, “It’s called Re-imagine Fort Worth 2050 Comprehensive Plan, and is the first time in the last 20 years that we have had a high level of public engagement rather than it being a staff-driven effort.”
On the data analytics front, the city has inventoried all its numerous databases to lead toward the development of a data warehouse for a “one-truth” source of information for City use. Additionally, it has built numerous dashboards and modeling that analyze fire overtime, appropriate minimum wage for our economy, and housing inventories.
A couple of other initiatives that Cooke talked about a year ago were to begin implementing both Lean Six Sigma and Sunrise Reviews. Though the city is still at the very beginning of its current foray into the world of Lean Six Sigma (though it had made efforts in the past to do so) and it hasn’t done any sunset review yet, “We hired a new strategic initiatives manager in June to implement both Lean Six Sigma and sunrise reviews,” says Cooke “These are both part of the program/process evaluation toolbox we will use when we identify trends.”
Fort Worth has hardly crossed any finish lines yet, and Cooke describes all these efforts as long-term ones, but progress is being made and the train is still on the tracks. To hear Cooke go into more depth about the work being done in Fort Worth, sign up for a November 15 Government Finance Officers Association webinar in which he is participating.
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