THE FUTURE OF GOVERNMENT FINANCE.

“Every time a citizen pays a tax, they are performing a small but effectively involuntary act of trust,” writes Chris Adams, founder of Weigh-In, which helps residents and public leaders engage in more informed, constructive policy discussions about budgets.  “Each purchase, pay stub or property tax bill is a reminder of their obligation to government. But when residents don’t understand or support how those dollars are used, that trust can sour.”

One of the primary ways in which this outcome can be avoided is by professionals who gather citizen input and take it one step further – they use it.

“The challenge,” says Bob Lavigna, a long-time authority about and advocate for public sector employees. “is that you need to know you’re hearing from all voices, not just the squeaky wheels.  And there are different ways to do that, including town hall meetings, listening sessions, focus groups, city council meetings, employee and community surveys, and so on.”

There are certainly ways around that issue. For example, according to Matt Leighninger, Director for the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League, “Decatur, Georgia parks all of their police cars and fire trucks and their street sweepers in the town square and young families bring their kids and the kids can get their picture taken behind the wheel of the fire truck. Meanwhile, you've got information for the families about how much it costs to maintain these vehicles. In addition, they provide surveys that people can fill out on the spot so you've got a layer of serious public participation and also a healthy dose of fun and things that attract people who would never come perhaps to a public meeting.”

Sadly, in many places it’s common for residents to participate in some kind of outreach from their cities or counties to find out what they’re feeling, but then they never hear back again. As Leighninger says, “You know, whether people come to a meeting or they fill out a survey or go to some online platform, they're often giving feedback and not knowing whatever came from it. (That’s) partly because all these things are set up as one-off opportunities. Most of them are not set up as ongoing relationships between residents and government.”

Leighninger is also concerned about making certain that the sentiments of the public are well represented when they’re called upon to provide their thoughts about the way the government should utilize its resources. “You can have elected officials or staff feeling that people are okay with everything because they're not showing up to these meetings, or they're not filling out the survey. And then suddenly, something becomes controversial, or something planned for months and months is now kind of filtered out in the community. People know what's going on. Suddenly, they don't like it, and then you've got hundreds of people who finally show up at the meeting, and at that point, you can't go back.”

Ultimately, this kind of negative reaction doesn’t stand in the way of successfully using citizens’ input to guide decisions. Take Wichita Kansas, which makes great use of citizen input to help form its budget. The budget document itself explains, “To receive feedback about service levels and priorities, a community survey was sent to a random sample of households in November 2025. . .  The results were shared at a City Council workshop in March 2026. Residents were asked to rate service levels and identify how much priority should be placed on each service in the next two years.”

The city paid attention, and in January, the resource allocation was tied to the objective of continuing to provide similar dollars in the 2027 budget process to those services that were rated as higher quality/higher performance while focusing attention on ways to deal with those that were in the quadrant of services that were rated lower quality/higher performance.

Another example – which illustrates the importance of keeping the community in the loop as their input is considered, took place in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The city had federal grant money coming in, and city leaders wanted to ensure it was being used for the services that the city’s residents wanted. “I arranged for two in-person events,” explains Jennifer Rummell, Lancaster’s community development administrator.

The first elicited 224 individual responses and the second got another 137. Residents were given a list of ten things for which community members frequently expressed their needs, including housing, homelessness services, crime prevention, workforce development, access to healthcare, public transportation, and so on. That was followed up by an online platform to engage more people, “and we received 231 participants, more than either of the in-person events,” says Rummell. The city used social media and its own website to promote the online platform.

“We expected to see that homelessness and affordable housing would be the top two things,’ she explains. “They were, but we didn’t expect (direct services to the homeless) to be high on the list.”

Rummell goes on, ‘We used the survey responses to inform our allocation of funding to indirect homelessness services (our police social worker program and our health and housing case management program), but subsequent community public comment periods revealed that the community -- both citizens and some city council members – wanted greater direct services being provided to the homeless, and ultimately $50,000 was shifted to those services.”

Going forward, there’s a technique that’s been in common use in Europe, Canada and Latin America which has enormous potential to bring in citizen input in a way in which it can be effectively used. It utilizes Civic Assemblies and brings in broadly representative groups of people from a government entity, who are involved in a three-step process to come up with recommendations about a single issue of importance.  

First, they spend time getting educated about the topic at hand by experts who can make them quasi-experts themselves. Step two involves the participants reflecting on what they’d learned and thinking through the various approaches the entity might take. Finally, the group is gathered once again to make recommendations to the entity, which are considered by their elected officials.

Though other places in the United States are beginning to consider using this approach, so far Snohomish County, Washington, population over 870,000 has been the biggest of them all. Leaders there decided that they wanted to get feedback about the ways the county should be using artificial intelligence. And they turned to Civic Genius, which used to be an independent organization, then came under the National Civic League umbrella in late 2024 to follow through. They followed that three-step process over a series of three weekends.

“We made it abundantly clear in every communication, starting from the very beginning, that the county council was committed to formally receiving, considering, and publicly responding to the recommendations from the civic assembly,’ says Jillian Youngblood, executive director of Civic Genius.

In the third step of this process, “We then went through a marathon voting session,” explains Youngblood in a column supported by Civic Marketplace. “People had monitors at their tables and they were making edits and when they were done with that we put everything up on a big screen and then everyone voted anonymously so they could see in real time what the vote count was.” Anything that got votes from over 80 percent of the participants moved forward to become part of the final document. There was a great deal of consensus at this stage. In fact, eight of the recommendations got support from over 95 percent of the group.

Right now, the City Council is considering the recommendations, But obviously, not all will be adopted. “If the assembly comes up with something that has a huge price tag attached to it, they may not be able to do it,” says Youngblood, and the council has to do due diligence to make sure that the recommendations are feasible. And I think that people get that. It’s an honest and reasonable thing to say.”

There’s one hitch here: To get a group of people to give up three weekends of their lives, $500 stipends were paid. Beyond that, there were other expenses. In Snohomish’s case, this funding was supported by five philanthropic organizations, but other places might want to do civic assemblies, but simply not have the cash to do so.

Whatever means are used to gather usable citizen input, there are a number of guidelines a government should follow. Four if them were offered in a document produced by Polco, a civic engagement and community data platform that connects local governments and public organizations with residents. In a July 27 blog  Polco offers up some ideas to make sure that the citizen input an entity is receiving is valid.

·        “The strongest input starts from a representative sample of the community, so the results reflect residents overall rather than the subset with the time and motivation to participate.”

·        “Even a good sample skews. Aligning results to actual community demographics, using sources like the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, keeps one group from speaking for everyone.”

·        “Knowing that respondents actually live in your community and being able to separate verified residents from general participants, lets you weigh input with confidence.”

·        “Clear methods, visible demographics, and an audit trail mean that when someone asks ‘how do you know,’ you have a one sentence answer instead of a shrug.”

As important as these guidelines are – they are just the first step toward getting the kind of feedback that can lead to action. And when citizen’s speak, if they’re not heard and if leaders aren’t motivated by their comments, it’s fundamentally a waste of everybody’s time.

This article is supported by the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA). The article, by Barrett and Greene, is also available in the August issue of GFOA’s Women’s Public Finance Newsletter. 

#StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #CityGovernmentManagement #CountyGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalCitizenOutreach #ListeningToPublicOpinion #ListeningToResidentFeedback  #ResidentFeedbackAndGovernmentAction #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityGovernmentPerformance #CountyGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #ResidentInputAndResidentDemographics #StateandLocalInnovation #CityInnovation #CountyInnovation #UtilizingResidentInput #UtilizingResidentInput #ResidentInputAndBudgetAllocation #StateandLocalGovernmentBudgeting #CivicAssembliesAndCitizenOutreach #CityGovernmentAndCitizenOutreach #CountyGovernmentAndCitizenOutreach #CountyGovernmentAndCivicAssemblies #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #SnohomishCountyCivicAssembly #InternationalUseOfCivicAssembly #NationalCivicLeague #CenterForDemocracyInnovaton #CivicGenius #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #GFOA #LancasterPennsylvania #WichitaKansas #DecaturGeorgia #Polco #WeighIn #ChrisAdams #BobLavigna #JillianYoungblood #MattLeighninger #BarrettandGreeneInc