Budgeting for Public Works

You will learn how to use various budget formats to communicate your department’s operational costs, benefits, effectiveness, and changes over time, as well as work with your agency’s capital budgeting process to meet long range department needs.

• Public works supervisors who wish to sharpen their skills
• Supervisors and managers who are new to the field of public works
• Public works employees who wish to prepare for advancement
• Public works engineers who are new to supervision and management
• Public works professionals engaged in the APWA Donald C. Stone Center leadership and management career path

 Making Budgeting More Than Paperwork

• Budgeting and the “Management Cycle”: plan-budget-execute-report and evaluate
• Competing purposes of budgeting: legal compliance, control, management, planning
• Obstacles to making budgeting useful to managers
• Multiyear program planning: What happens before annual budgeting becomes critical?
• How does your budget rate?  Applying Government Finance Officers’ Association (GFOA) standards for effective operations budgeting to your budget

Differing Budget Approaches and “Looks”: Fund-based Budgeting and Accounting

• Legal compliance drives governmental “fund” based budgeting & accounting
• Each government fund type addresses differing budgeting purposes
  • Examples
• Alternate budget objectives & related budget “looks” and formats
• Budgeting in a cutback mode: “Flexible” budgets example
• Budgeting in a cutback mode: Zero based budgeting example
  • Case Exercise #1: Reshaping “Average City” Public Works Department operations budget

Capital Budgeting Overview

• Defining “Capital” – Contrasting capital versus operations
• What to budget for capital – Annual cash flow or total project cost?
• Capital “projects” versus capital “programs”
• Annual capital budget process

Selecting Projects for a Capital Budget

• Update condition assessment for existing asset classes
• Tools for assessing the existing physical plant
  • Case Exercise #2: Rating competing capital budget project requests
• Evaluate each competing capital project using criteria to score each project
• Evaluate potential new capital projects – analytical techniques
  • Lifecycle Cash Flow (LCF) analysis and the Time Value of Money
  • Case Exercise #3:  Repair, buy or lease an office processor?

"Very well done. This is a dry topic. You presented it in a very interesting fashion. Thank you."
—Village of Rochester

"Very interactive. Energetic instructor!"

"Seeing different ways and techniques to budget."

"The class gave me a new perspective on how to use the budge as an educative call. There are multiple things I will use from this class on a regular basis."
—City of Kewaunee

"Everything will be helpful to understanding budgets."

Mike Daun

Michael Daun is a private financial consultant and the former deputy comptroller for the City of Milwaukee. Prior to his promotion to deputy comptroller, he held three financial directorships at the city including financial services, accounts and policy management. He was a senior budget officer for the governor’s office of the state of Illinois and served as chair of the GFOA standing committee on capital planning and economic development. He has an MBA in public finance from Cornell University and a civil engineering degree from Marquette University.

Benjamin Jordan

Ben Jordan is a program director with Interdisciplinary Professional Programs in the transportation sector. He has over 35 years of experience in civil engineering and public works. He earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and is a Licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Illinois.