I’ve set some lofty goals here but we won’t achieve any of them until we achieve fiscal solvency and responsible spending. My goal is for the city to provide a more clear, and easy to read budget. Remove all the acronyms. Make the “Account Name” less mystical and much more detailed. I want the average person to be able to look at that document and know how money is being spent. There should be no mystery as to how and where we spend our money. My goal is to uncover wasteful spending. I’m confident that in a budget as large as our that there are many ways we can conserve. I don’t want to simply cut line items. I want to improve the efficiency of our spending. At FedEx we are eligible for a year end bonus. Part of the incentive to earning that bonus is to find ways to improve efficiency. That could be either finding a way to do something better or coming up with ways to get the same end result for less money. It works pretty well. I would advocate a system that rewards city employees and citizens for the same watchdog like behavior.
Another example of how this might work is laid out in this article: