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User Friendly Budget

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On January 14, 2015 the Local Finance Board (LFB), which is part of the Division of Local Government Services, adopted regulations that require municipalities in the State of New Jersey to complete on an annual basis a User-Friendly Budget document. As a result of this requirement, as of fiscal year 2015, New Jersey municipalities must submit to the Division of Local Government Services a User-Friendly Budget as part of their annual budget package. Due this requirement, as a member of the Department of Local Government Services, I am developing a strategic research plan for determining whether or not the new requirement to create a User-Friendly Budget is having a positive impact on local government. The proposed research project will analyze …show more content…

These three objectives are: i) to summarize the annual municipal budgets; ii) to display information on key cost drivers; and iii) to better explain the municipal budget’s impact on local property taxes. As described by the LFB, these objectives were adopted to address the fact that local municipality budgets tend to be complicated and confusing and can run upwards of 50 or more pages. Creation of the User-Friendly Budget was intended to result in a simplified presentation of the actual municipal budget. Information included in the User-Friendly Budget consists, among other items, of the tax impact, revenue summary, appropriation summary, structural imbalances, tax assessment, and personnel costs. This information is designed to give citizens a brief understanding of the how a local municipal budget is going to operate based on revenue and expenditures for the coming fiscal year. In creating this research project, a logic model was used to demonstrate the resources, activities and outputs that are necessary in order to analyze the two proposed hypotheses. The resources in each municipality involved in the creation of a User-Friendly budget include the LFB which required the use of User-Friendly Budgets, the local municipal mayor, town council members and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), all of whom create the budget, and local citizens who provide this group feedback on any proposed budget. Consequently, these are the resources that must be involved in the analysis of the two

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