Fort Worth’s newly formed department, FWLab, puts the city on the “cutting edge” of rethinking its budgeting process, according to Shayne Kavanagh who has been working on local government finance for 20 years.
Since February, the city has been working to transform its planning, data and analytics department into the FWLab. Its goal is to better integrate data into the city’s long-term planning process, from budgeting to bonds to the city’s forthcoming comprehensive plan. While the transition is still in progress, residents could see more public engagement through the FWLab in the upcoming budget cycle.
In the city’s current budget process, departments present what resources they need or want in the upcoming fiscal year. City management either selects or declines those requests before going to the City Council for final approval. Often, the city lacks data to back up why one investment may be better than another and decisions are based on logic alone, said Mark McDaniel, chief transformation officer with the city.
“We just haven’t had (usable data) up to now, and we’re working on it,” McDaniel said. “It’ll take us a while to build it, but once we have that, it’s going to be amazing.”
Fort Worth’s current approach to budgeting isn’t uncommon, McDaniel said. That’s why, after retiring from city government after 35 years, he turned his focus to helping cities take cues from the private sector to think innovatively. The FWLab will have an advisory board of local business executives, who will give the city advice on how to modernize their financial processes by making more data-informed budgeting decisions and engaging the public.
“We don’t have to do what the private sector does, in our case, Fort Worth can make it relevant to the work that we’re doing, and just improve upon how we’re doing business,” McDaniel said.
Part of McDaniel’s goal is to rethink how the city uses public input to shape its priorities. He plans to go beyond the city’s typical engagement strategies of weekly public meetings in special input sessions with interest groups.
“There’s many other tools out there,” McDaniel said. “People are just so preoccupied with so many different things. … For them to come down to some building at night when they are trying to get their kids to bed doesn’t always work, so we have to make it easier.”
The city plans to use software and social media platforms to solicit other types of feedback from residents, alongside the more traditional town hall meetings.
It can be difficult to ensure that residents can track the input they provide into real-world outcomes in their neighborhood, especially right away, McDaniel said. However, through making more city data publicly available in user-friendly dashboards, he hopes to make the planning process more accessible to the average person.
Public engagement is key to creating a new method for budgeting, said Kavanagh, senior manager of research at the Government Finance Officers Association, a professional association focused on good public finance.
Good public engagement allows cities to create trust between residents and local government and ensure the city is responding to the needs and desires of its residents.
“Government is owned by the people,” Kavanagh said. “It is morally incumbent upon the government to be responsive to what folks want.”
City procures new tools for data analytics
McDaniel was hired by the city to serve as interim director of the planning and data analytics department in February. Since then, he has been “building the plane while it’s flying,” McDaniel said.
His goal was initially to evaluate the city’s data and analytics department and make recommendations. In a presentation to the City Council on May 2, McDaniel presented his plan for the revamped department. He was wearing a white coat, a nod to the department’s new name, FWLab, while describing nine new strategies to revamp the city’s data collection and planning.
Most of those strategies required better access and aggregation of data. Previously, the city wasn’t able to use the data it collects across departments because of how the information was collected and aggregated differently. When it came to planning and budgeting, the lack of consistent data collection and aggregation made it difficult to draw conclusions and make decisions, McDaniel said.
“We’re trying to standardize the data and have one data source for many things,” McDaniel said. “So it’s all consistent, it’s scrubbed and it’s reliable. So that when you try to pull it to cross tabulate it with some other data, there’s some validity to it.”
The city will pay about $50,000 London-based contractor Delivery Associates to perform an audit of the city’s data analytics and processes. The department will ask for additional staff to help implement the city’s new data processes in fiscal year 2024, McDaniel said.
Those data collection and aggregation improvements are still underway, but the team is farther ahead then McDaniel anticipated, he said. Once the city has access to more reliable data, McDaniel and the department plan to use those numbers to create a new system for budgeting, called priority-based budgeting.
Priority based budgeting
In fiscal year 2024, the city selected three departments to pilot priority-based budgeting: police, human resources and transportation and public works.
Currently, the city takes an incremental approach to budgeting. As the city grows, the budget stays mostly the same in structure and priorities, just with more money for staffing and maintenance to account for growth.
The city wants to get away from that method of budgeting to take a more long-term approach, McDaniel said.
“There was never a re-evaluation of what you’re doing and if it really meets the needs of the community,” McDaniel said.
When implemented over the next couple years, priority-based budgeting will take the priorities identified by council members and use them as a framework for the upcoming budget. Every expenditure will be tied back to those priorities, McDaniel said.
For example, if several council members’ priority is ensuring there are zero pedestrian road fatalities in their districts, improvements to crosswalks, lighting and sidewalks would likely take priority over other road improvements.
“The city has thousands of options on how to dedicate its time and resources and money, but how do you make sure that they line up with what the community says is their goal?,” said Clay Pearson, a contractor with the city focused on priority-based budgeting.
The speed of Fort Worth’s growth makes it an ideal candidate to take on a priority-based budgeting strategy. As the city’s population expands, the options for funding expand, too, Pearson said.
Fort Worth’s combination of planning and data analytics could allow the city to chip away at its toughest problems in a more efficient way. In Atlanta, priority-based budgeting is being used to focus on affordable housing, Kavanagh said.
While the public will likely see differences in public engagement this budget cycle, the updated planning process won’t be fully implemented for several budget cycles. In the meantime, McDaniel plans to incorporate more data into the city’s longer-term planning through bond programs and the city’s comprehensive plan.
Rachel Behrndt is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at rachel.behrndt@fortworthreport.org or via Twitter.
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