CSotD: It’s good to be the watchdog

Comments ⁵

1. Dann

   I’ve been complaining about this sort of thing ever since my exposure to wacky federal budgeting due to my experiences in Marine aviation in the 1980s. At the time, maintenance funds would run out at some time in September…or August…and airplanes would be grounded. The down aircraft quickly became hangar queens for the remaining aircraft.
   Pilots would then share the remaining aircraft to get their monthly minimum flight hours. They would also do loops in the sky to burn up the aviation fuel budget. Otherwise, Congress would cut the aviation fuel budget for the next year.
   Allowing commanders to re-allocate funds based on their actual operational requirements would have gone a long way towards maximizing the benefit realized from those funds. Simply promising not to cut any unspent funds from the next year’s budget would also help.
   But in a world where a 3-5% annual bump in spending is considered a “spending cut”, other distortions of spending reality should be expected.
   Regards,
   Dann

2. Fran

   You were there in Room 413?
   I, too, recall the type of situation to which Dann refers. There was a dilemma at the end of one fiscal year when, for some out-of-the-ordinary reason we had money remaining in the budget. We knew we were going to need the full amount the next year, but that our budget would be cut to reflect the current excess. (We sent some folks for national-level training, knowing we didn’t have enough most years to do that. No clowns, though. Didn’t realize that was an option, much less tigers and penguins. Should have understood that excess should be spent on excess.)
   I like Dann’s suggested solutions to that.
   About the increases being cuts, however, we experienced that phenomenon more oftne – when costs were rising due to increases in the numbers of folks to be served, leaving a smaller amount for serving each person even with the overall rise. Economies of scale don’t always apply.

3. Mike Peterson

   Ditto — I like Dann’s solution, but am not as sure about the issue with small increases being cuts. You can cut from projections rather than the previous year, and projections aren’t always theoretical. I’ve covered too many school budget meetings where half the board members don’t realize that there are things that you know are going to go up, not just because of labor contracts that have to be honored but also things like health insurance. So, if you concede those costs and make other cuts, you can come in under the projected cost, but still show an increase from the previous year. Sometimes those cuts really draw blood, but you can’t go any lower without seriously failing in your central mission.
   So you have done a lot of slashing, but, no, you haven’t gone lower than previous year.

4. Dann

   I appreciate what you are talking about, Mike. Sometimes the mission changes and it just flat costs more for an organization to accomplish that mission.
   In my experience, it is far more likely that the inflationary bump is assumed, and an additional bump is also assumed rather than justified. And when anyone points out that the inflationary bump is adequate to cover inflationary costs and that there has been no significant mission change to justify an additional increase, the issue is immediately framed around a mythical budget “cut”.

5. Mike Peterson

   In my experience, the mission gets cut back in order to accommodate price increases that the school (or whoever) simply can’t control. And this was at schools that were incredibly innovative — for instance, setting up buying programs with other schools and with town governments to get bulk rates on office supplies, fuel oil and other things, or converting to wood pellet furnaces.
   In the latter case, it went back to your comment about letting the people on the ground make informed spending decisions. The superintendent said that, if they’d free the money saved for a new bus so he could put in the new boiler, he’d save them enough on heating that they could buy three buses.
   In the former case, it was business as usual: What have you saved us lately? And they slashed programs that — from their comments — they obviously didn’t understand and had targeted before the meeting began.
   Changing the mission to fit into the cookie cutter — and whether it’s firing computer and foreign language teachers because you don’t speak a foreign language or know how to turn on a computer, or closing Plattsburgh’s air base to spare McGuire (which happened to be in the chairman’s home state), it’s no way to fix a budget.