“It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.” - Marc Lipsitch, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health
COVID-19 has created a crisis for many municipal budgets. The impact of reduced tax and fee revenue, coupled with increased expenses, has shredded local government finances.
To make matters worse, the ability to plan for a recovery is not a straight-forward exercise, requiring all sectors of local government to create a variety of forecasts and scenarios that constantly evolve.
ResourceX recently established the practice of financial scenario planning as point #1 of it’s 3-point plan.
“We need to be able to rapidly monitor, analyze and communicate revenue impacts (and stress-test our solutions) as the crisis evolves. We’ll need to be able to update fiscal forecasts and potential future scenarios, adjusting for plausible fiscal impacts of new policies (which are all experiments) as they’re rolled out, and we’ll therefore have to continually update our playbook of solutions to be prepared for evolving scenarios.”
Webinar: Lessons from Fiscal Forecasting & Scenario Planning
Why: Learn how organizations are effectively:
Modeling the financial impacts of numerous COVID-19 scenarios
Communicating fiscal scenarios effectively with staff and elected officials
Driving strategies and solutions appropriate for the variety of fiscal futures
When: Wednesday, May 20th, at 12 pm Mountain
Registration has expired. Please see webinar video recording below!
Learn from municipal leaders from across the country! These leaders have assembled comprehensive fiscal forecasts and scenarios that have led to scenario-driven fiscal strategies and solutions.
Joining us for this webinar will be:
Kathleen Von Achen, Chief Financial Officer, Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas
Jamie Rouch, Director of Finance, City of Branson, Missouri
Don Hudson, Chief Financial Officer, City of Tualatin, Oregon
Background
A guiding principle of our work is to try and understand the most likely fiscal recovery scenarios. The most prominent potential recovery scenarios include "Big V," "Little V," "W," and "L."
While fiscal recovery will likely look very different across cities, counties and states, the unpredictable nature of COVID-19 and its various impacts make scenario planning critical for maximum preparedness.
A May 8th article in the NY Times (This Is the Future of the Pandemic - Covid-19 isn’t going away soon. Two recent studies mapped out the possible shapes of its trajectory), quotes Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health: “It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.”
Nobody of course knows how this will all turn out, but according to two future-focused studies cited in the article, lacking a vaccine, our pandemic state of economies and our collective mind may persist "well into 2021 or 2022.”
Webinar Case Studies
On March 23rd, ResourceX launched it’s first cohort of free onboarding into Fiscal Health scenario planning and forecasting software and support.
Today a total of 8 complete cohorts have gone through scenario planning training, with over 150 individuals trained, and the first 20 using the free software tools.
GFOA offered a fiscal scenario planning webinar to demonstrate 4 main scenarios to model, identify appropriate solutions for each scenario. • Part I: Defining 4 Plausible Scenarios to Plan Around: GFOA and ResourceX Webinar • Part II: Building a Playbook of Solutions for Each of the 4 Scenarios:
For easy to use screen-shots, here's a PDF file of the "cliff note version" of the webinar slides: click here to download
The Unified Government of Kansas City KS, Branson MO, and Tualatin OR are each current practitioners of Fiscal Health scenario planning, forecasting, and modeling. And these three organizations are joining us to report back on what they’re learning from their approaches to modeling various evolving scenarios as well as strategies.
