“What a relief!” exclaimed Boulder City Clerk Megan McCauley. The City Council had, after a second special meeting, just voted to approve Boulder’s budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year. McCauley added: “I need a mental health day.”
She’s probably not the only one. Local budgeting is a torturous, four-month-long slog that consumes many hundreds of hours of city and county employees. And that doesn’t count the time it takes to explain the result to bewildered journalists. (“NO! No more budget questions!” County Clerk and Recorder Ginger Kunz jokingly replied when I asked to talk about this piece.)
The effort required to get to a budget has grown increasingly daunting over the years — and so has the result. Jefferson County’s entire 1983 budget document, much of it hand-written, comprised just 33 pages. By 1998, 25 years ago, the expenditure budget alone, the portion that describes how money will be spent, had ballooned to 65 pages.
This year’s preliminary expenditure budget was 110 pages — containing, by my estimate, maybe 200,000 data points. The total document, including a breakdown of revenues and calculations of associated mill rates, probably will extend to around 276 pages, similar to those of the last few years. The stout of heart should be able to peruse it soon via the county website. (Boulder’s 2023-2024 budget totals 80 pages, relatively svelte but still up from 57 a decade earlier.)
You may ask, as I did: Why? What has happened over the years to make county and municipal budgets, and the process that drives them, so long and arcane? Is that a good thing, or not? And is there a better way?
The answer, not surprisingly, is complicated.
First, governments include more information in their budgets because they can. Although the basic six-digit budgetary, accounting, and reporting system that’s standard in Montana hasn’t changed much over the years, the software applications that counties and municipalities use have — a lot. “It’s gotten easier to include more information,” says Nancy Everson, governmental finance director at the Montana Association of Counties. “It’s a whole different world” from the old hand-written forms. The complexity of that software in part reflects the increasingly tough financial reporting standards of the Government Accounting Standards Board.
Second, the budget reflects the increasing size and complexity of government itself. Montana counties and cities can’t increase their core property taxes by more than half the rate of inflation — but they can create special districts that raise money by assessments for targeted services within a limited geography.
That’s what has happened as Jefferson County’s population has grown, especially in and around the northern communities of Montana City and Clancy. The Faith Lane Rural Maintenance District, for example, has $14,000 allocated in this year’s budget. Big Sky Acres has $13,830. Neither existed a decade ago.
The calculations in these cases are straightforward: District residents pay an assessment each year to support county-provided services, usually road maintenance. But each new district adds at least a page to the county’s budget, and that adds up: 25 pages in the current-year expenditure budget are consumed by the accounting for various rural improvement and maintenance districts. (In the 1983 budget, there was just one, for Basin.)
The county could decline to support these rapidly breeding districts — but, “saying no to everything isn’t good governance,” Kunz says.
At the same time, more and more state and federal grant money has flowed into counties and cities. The Covid pandemic provided Exhibit A: The county received $199,042 via the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which mostly paid for contract staff to test and provide care for residents. And the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021 was an enormous windfall, bringing $427,057 of revenue to the county in the 2021-2022 fiscal year and another $1.1 million last year — supporting the Western Legacy Center in Whitehall and child care in Boulder, among other projects. The Local Assistance and Tribal Consistency Fund brought another $441,592 in each of the last two years.
But that’s not all: The county has budgeted $58,918 this year for revenue from the Hard Rock Mine Trust, the proceeds of a state mining tax that’s distributed to counties to support economic diversification after mines close. The budget also includes $831,913 from a Minimum Allocation Grant from the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation; this is more ARPA money, in this case to fund water and sewer improvement projects. Another DNRC grant, for $210,000, has been allocated to pay for improvements in the Clancy Water and Sewer District.
And so on; the list of federal grants and state funding is exhaustive, and pretty exhausting when you have to account for it all. For the county, it amounts to “work we like,” as Commissioner Bob Mullen puts it: The new revenue allows local government to be more responsive, and it can ease the financial burden on local property tax payers.
How you feel about that probably depends on where you sit on the political spectrum. Some will decry the expansion of government; others will welcome what they see as support for needed services to rural communities.
Me, I’m just trying to figure out the accounting — and I’m finding it increasingly difficult. If you understand what you’re looking at, the county’s comprehensive reckoning is admirably transparent. But most citizens aren’t trained in the intricacies of public-sector finance — and for them, tracking the twists and turns of allocations from the state’s 2023 Bridge and Road Safety and Accountability Act, for one, takes some doing.
Could local government budgets preserve the transparency but be more accessible? I’d love to see a one-page summary budget that makes it simpler for people to grasp what’s going on — listing only departmental totals for the coming fiscal year with comparisons to the current year. I’d also welcome a more comprehensive narrative, where government leaders explain in plain English what their spending priorities are, where the money is coming from, and how the numbers are changing.
Budgets are our best and truest windows into the workings of government. A ton of good work goes into them. Let’s make the result something everyone can easily grasp. And then, it’s on everyone — that’s us, the citizens — to do the work of understanding what all those numbers mean.
