Budget Preparation Is Accounting for All These Commitments

In March you see a headline city has budget deficit of $2 million but you have no sense of scale for that. And then by June you see oh council adopts balanced budget and then the real kicker is about five months later when the financial statements are prepared, it's like oh city has a $500,000 surplus. So there's no way to integrate those facts from the outside. People wind up getting just paralyzed by the data out of context," he says.