“The City of Shawnee, Kansas is leading a completely unique effort to look across the city and region, and understand how the resources given to all of us by our citizens, businesses, visitors and members of our community are being prioritized and used most wisely.”
History and Background of Shawnee’s PBB Evolution
The City of Shawnee, Kansas first implemented priority based budgeting (PBB) in 2013. As part of this process, a comprehensive review of existing services, or ‘programs’, was conducted, including allocating costs to each Program. The City launched into this effort to reassess spending, and ensure sound, long-term funding decisions.
The culmination of this effort was a burst of transparency as the city became the first PBB community member to publish on the city’s website a complete list, description and cost of each city program.
City leaders were intent on extending information to citizens to open up a dialogue about the full breadth and scope of services offered, and the cost of these services, and built an interactive online tool to allow citizens to drill-down into each of the City’s departments to a division level, and ultimately down to a program level to see every program offered.
Over the years, Shawnee continued to apply PBB while we at ResourceX simultaneously created new ways to apply priority based budgeting data. And one of our breakthroughs has been the development and application of program mapping.
Program Mapping: Gateway to “Level 4 PBB Mastery”
Program Mapping is a simple breakthrough for identifying your local government’s public and private sector partners, creating partnerships at the program level, and unleashing the power of a networked force of agencies in the creation of a fantastic future.
Exploring regional partnership opportunities (aka program mapping) are becoming more and more important in our work in priority based budgeting. Recently we wrote about a "Partnership Summit" in Clear Creek County, CO (Clear Creek County "Program Mapping" Looks to Accelerate Service Delivery through Regional Partnerships). We wrote, "Clear Creek County is leading a completely unique effort to look across the region, and understand how the resources given to all of us by our citizens, businesses, visitors and members of our community are being prioritized and used most wisely.
County leaders recently implemented a “Priority Based Budgeting” process, through which we’ve identified every single service the County offers (over 800 distinct County services!), the cost of providing those services, and key characteristics about each service (for example, the degree to which each program is mandated upon us, the likelihood that the program is provided by another private sector entity or public sector entity, and the size of population served by each program)."
Much like Moffat County, CO, (Massive Regional Resource Optimization Initiative Underway in Moffat County, Colorado) where County fiscal conditions across the State are requiring all counties to consider radical new ways to form partnerships to deliver services, Clear Creek County, CO is proactively taking similar steps.
Consider these outcomes:
In Moffat County, they have discovered that 59% of the County’s entire budget is invested in programs that other local service providers also are providing. These could be services that the County decides to provide in partnership with the local provider, outsource to the local provider to free up resources, or in-source to the County in exchange for revenue.
In addition, Moffat County has learned that the remaining 41% of their budget is invested in programs that the County is currently uniquely qualified to provide (a much lower percentage than was anticipated, which is a good finding given the scarcity of resources to ensure are prioritized).
In Clear Creek County, the incredible discovery made was that the County has upwards of 78% of it’s budget invested in programs for which they could leverage local partners, outsource to, or in-source from to either free up resources for reallocation, or generate new revenue. Amazingly this leaves 22% of the County’s budget allocated to programs for which there are no apparent partners to consider, at least given the scope of the partnership exploration thus far conducted.
With the assistance of ResourceX, the City of Shawnee Kansas (in conjunction with the Shawnee Chamber of Commerce) will hold an unprecedented Community Meeting on August 15th inviting dozens of the City’s leading public, non-profit and private businesses. The sole purpose of this meeting is to evaluate partnership opportunities through "Program Mapping."
Through Shawnee’s multi-year work in PBB, the City possesses an invaluable and crystal clear understanding of every program they deliver. And will make this data available with the intention of identifying partnership opportunities to increase the value of program delivery while simultaneously reducing budget expenses.
Shawnee Goes to Level 4: Partnerships and Pancakes
As the services we provide change and grow, from time to time we can come across challenges to providing those services that require more of our attention, money, and staffing. The City has a goal this year to review programs and services and evaluate partnership opportunities, whether that be internally or externally. Earlier this year, we reviewed all of our internal program partnership opportunities and wanted to expand that discussion to the entire community including businesses, non-profits, schools, healthcare facilities and more.
Following the success and proven approach of similar Program Match-Up workshops in Moffat County CO and Clear Creek County CO, organizations participating in Shawnee’s Program Mapping initiative come to identify the services they share in common (“match up”) with local governments in their region. Service-sharing opportunities in common are then to be characterized in terms of partnership, merged/consolidated services, in-sourced regionally provided services, or out-sourced opportunities from the perspective of each participant. And finally, these opportunities are further characterized and prioritized in terms of the magnitude of complexity in implementing a shared-service approach, and the value of the opportunity if it were to be realized.
The City is partnering with the Shawnee Chamber of Commerce to utilize ResourceX to help us put on a workshop for those Shawnee businesses and Chamber members, as an introduction to City programs and services. We would love for you to join us at our Partnerships and Pancakes breakfast, where we will walk the businesses through a program inventory “match up” to identify programs that we may have in common and have a broader discussion of envisioned opportunities for partnerships.
Related Articles Highlighting Successful Regional Partnership Case Studies
Washington County, WI - Proactively seeks partnerships with neighboring jurisdictions to deliver vital services
Toledo, OH - City partners with Chamber of Commerce to implement PBB. Partnership develops "Networked Enterprises." City first to launch Open PBB Data
Moffat County, CO - Resource optimization through county-wide partnerships
Longmont, CO - Joins Open PBB Data movement. 2nd city in the nation to provide all city PBB data to citizens and community through Open PBB Data portal
Rapid City, SD - Launch comprehensive Citizen Budget Priority Survey and apply PBB data to reallocate resources
