Back in August, when most people were enjoying the last few weeks of summer, the Board of Finance (BOF) was rolling out a new approach to budgeting that had board members already diving into various department budgets for the next fiscal year. On Sept. 12, that new approach had its first test drive with a presentation from Madison Youth & Family Services (MYFS).

In a typical year, town departments prepare their budgets for the next fiscal year in the fall, present those budgets to the Board of Selectmen (BOS) in December, and then the BOF takes over early in the new calendar year. This year, the BOF decided to start sitting down with various department heads now to try to better understand what goes into each budget and to make the whole process more collaborative.

BOF members are already assigned to various departments or boards as liaisons, so those existing relationships were used to let BOF members dive into specific department budgets. Major departments the board will look at include the Police, Fire, Public Works, and Beach & Recreation as well as Madison Ambulance, the Board of Education (BOE), and the library.

Beyond the large departments—from both a size and funding perspective—the board also wanted to use this new approach to take a look at departments that might not be a large component of the budget, but, like MYFS, do a lot of work with limited funding.

At the BOF meeting on Sept. 12, MYFS Director Scott Cochran gave a presentation to the board covering the services his department offers and taking the opportunity to talk to the BOF about future funding needs of his department.

MYFS provides clinical and social services as well as prevention programs. A large portion of the department’s work centers around the Madison Alcohol and Drug Education (MADE), a coalition focused on promoting youth self-esteem and education to help young people make smart decisions. The coalition is funded in part by the office of National Drug Control Policy Drug Free Communities Support Program and the State Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services Partnership for Success grant. That grant has helped fund the program for years, but is scheduled to sunset in late 2019, so the department will have to find another way to support the coalition.

“As we are looking to the future, we are looking to reorganize some staffing...We need to address a couple of retirements and what we would like to do is incorporate MADE into our programs,” Cochran said. “It exists now kind of as a separate entity with grant money and once that grant is gone next year, we don’t want to lose MADE. If we lose MADE, we don’t have a coalition. It will dis-enable us for applying from other grants to bring in funding to do substance abuse prevention and things like that. We need a coalition in order to apply for more grants and we need MADE to survive and continue to work.”

Cochran spoke with the board about how he would like to reorganize staffing to support the program, the net cost of those changes, and future grant opportunities to support MADE.

“I am pretty confident that we are going to be competitive getting grants to offset some of the cost to continue the coalition,” he said. “We had a five-year term at the beginning [of the grant] and then there was actually about a year where we didn’t have the grant and we had to reapply for it, so the town had to actually pick up the tab at that point. We applied again and were able to get the grant.

“The grant itself is $125,000 a year and that funded not only the positions, but also training and some of the program supplies and some of the campaigns that we did, so it did a lot,” he continued.

The board and Cochran discussed how the town had previously acted essentially as a back-up plan to fund the program while the department applied for a new grant. Board members agreed that having the opportunity to speak with department heads and learn about these potential future costs demonstrates why this early approach to budgeting is beneficial.

“I think that Scott said it best when he said, ‘This is where is the money going and this is a better understanding of what those programs are’ and I think for us it’s not just about planning, its about the budget,” said BOF Chair Jean Fitzgerald. “We are looking at planning and five years and it is important for us to see where the money will be going over the next five years and what the needs will be.”

Fitzgerald said the whole point of these meetings with various departments is to improve communication and give departments a chance to be heard and explain their final budget numbers.

“I do think a lot of this whole kind of planning for us came out of the library and the library saying that they felt like they were blindsided,” she said. “Whether that is true or not I am not going to argue, I am just saying that this gives people another opportunity and it gives us an opportunity to understand the budget…I think it is really important for us to understand what we are basing our decisions on.”

BOF member Kevin Kranzler said the MYFS presentation proves this new approach can be very affective.

“This has been the most informative presentation that I have received in my time on the BOF,” he said. “It’s incredibly helpful and it makes our jobs a lot easier because it helps us quickly understand where you guys are coming from.”

The next department set to come before the BOF in October is the Department of Senior Services. BOF member Ken Kaminsky said this process helps answer a lot of questions before the budget crunch in late spring.

“Not only is it important for us to understand, but it is also important for the public to understand because these are the questions we certainly get a budget time when it is the end of the line and people say, ‘Why this or why that?’” he said. “That is when a ton of misinformation gets out there and this is a great opportunity to inform the public early on.”