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11/20/2018 10:57 AMWith town departments already working to pull together their proposed budgets for 2019-’20, Guilford officials are encouraging residents to get involved with the process early and stay involved as the budget develops and changes over the next several months.
How the budget is built can often seem complex. It begins with department heads submitting their requested operating budget for the coming fiscal year to the finance director. The director then compiles those budgets and passes it on to the Board of Selectmen (BOS). The BOS then holds a series of workshops early in the new year before the town budget joins with the Board of Education (BOE) budget to go before the Board of Finance (BOF). Once the BOF has the budget in hand, that board does its own review, holds public meetings, and then eventually sends the budget to the public at referendum sometime in April.
As the budget build can take months, BOF Chair Mike Ayles said this year he wants to try to communicate more with residents how everything comes together.
“During this budget season, I wanted to be a little more transparent about the process,” he said. “So ...when people are voting for the budget, [they] can say ‘OK, I understand the process, the meetings that have been going on, that this just hasn’t been thrown together in a month.’”
All budget workshops and meetings are public, but those meetings don’t often draw large crowds. Knowing that, First Selectman Matt Hoey said the town is bringing on a new budget tool this year.
“We want to makes as much information available to as many people as possible so if they choose to engage, and choose to have interest in this, there are new avenues for them to use,” he said. “Cleargov is one of those.”
Cleargov is a website that the town will populate with all of the budget information, hopefully making the data easier to find and understand.
“Cleargov is an emerging company that looks not only to provide information regarding the town’s specific budget, but also to benchmark it against other communities,” he said. “We were an early adopter in Connecticut, so there may not be a significant body of comparative data there now, but it is growing.”
Hoey said tools like Cleargov and early public involvements are designed to keep residents more informed about the budget and help people understand why certain increases or decreases are what they are.
“There are pieces of the budget we have no control over and debt service is one of them and the other is contract negotiation, assuming you are going to keep your current staffing levels,” he said.
Details like that can’t always be inferred from just looking at the budget top sheet and without that knowledge, especially when it comes to the debt component, historically the town has had trouble passing a budget on the first go when that fiscal year requires a sizable debt payment.
“People don’t usually see the detail of the budget until it is printed in the paper and then in the budget meeting,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea to provide as much information as we can, in as many ways as we can, as we go along.”
The town will hold a presentation on the capital budget for the upcoming fiscal year on Thursday, Nov. 29, time and location to be announced. To learn more about Cleargov or to find Guilford’s budget information in the program, visit www.cleargov.com.