Performance Based Budgeting Paper

Eureka Franklin
PAD 743-99
Final Paper

Performance based budgeting (PBB) systems are ever present and virtual to all state governments in the United States. To have a budgeting system that requires strategic planning, goal assessment, performance measurement, reporting and even program performance evaluation or auditing. The United States government has made efforts to infuse budgeting with rationality through the application of performance measurement. Efforts have been made in advancing communication and understanding among stakeholders about what governments do and how government operations are accomplished. While PBB initiatives can possibly add value to budgetary deliberations and support agency management, reform such as this does not
• Stronger Neighborhoods: New revenue from table games supports operating costs for the expanded Rita Church and C.C. Jackson recreation centers and the new Cherry Hill recreation and aquatic center planned to open in Fiscal 2018.
• A Growing Economy: Continues funding for services that promote small businesses and entrepreneurship, including the Emerging Technology Center, Small Business Resource Center, the Minority and Women’s Business Opportunity Office, Main Streets, business district cleaning, and the Baltimore Micro Loan Fund.
• Innovative Government: The City has trained nearly 1,000 employees to rethink how services are delivered, and is investing in their ideas. The results are impressive: same-day service at career centers, fewer fire truck accidents, faster vendor payments, and shorter waits for permits, just to name a few. The budget plan continues these initiatives.
• A Cleaner City: Further expands the proactive tree maintenance pilot that is improving the health of the city’s tree canopy and reducing storm damage and service request
City efforts at a results oriented budgeting system to date have greatly enhanced the transparency of government operations at this level though have not extended past what is termed by Joyce (2003) as “performance informed budgeting”. It is, a direct relationship between performance and budget allocation is not clear, even though information about federal government program performance is much more pervasive and readily available to budgetary decision makers internal to government as well as stakeholders external to government such as citizens and lobbyists. State and local governments across the U.S. have implemented untold varieties of performance based budgeting reforms as well (Melkers and Willoughby 1998; Poister and Streib 1999). The net effects from the implementation of such systems in these sub-national governments are mixed. Primarily, governments that have implemented performance related budgeting reforms experience enhanced communication among budgetary decision makers and stakeholders about government programs and activities, greater comfort with measurement and quantifying what government does, and clearer knowledge about the linkages between program goals and the means to attain such goals. On the other hand, not evidence exists that directly links program performance and its measurement with final appropriations. Here again, most of the