GUEST COLUMN.

Anyone who has served as budget director through the ups and downs of a local government’s financial fortunes has been called “Dr. No,” probably to their face. It is a dubious honorific conferred with a large degree of ambivalence – a mixture of sympathy and antipathy. As the person in charge of keeping spending within available resources, which are never enough to meet every need, it is your job to deny, deflect, divert, defer and sometimes destroy proposals, mostly well-intentioned, that would throw the budget off balance.

As Baltimore’s budget director during the Great Recession and its aftermath, I became well-practiced in using the least popular word in the English language and was egalitarian in doing so. Whether it was a department head requesting a hiring freeze exception; a councilmember asking pleadingly, “Why aren’t we tapping the Rainy Day Fund? It’s pouring out there!”; or a mayor wanting to concede to a union demand, I had the potential of standing in their way.

Looking back, my resistance was righteous, but being a barrier left me battered and wondering if I had struck the right balance between fiscal discipline and the risk-taking needed to achieve great things, conservatism and creativity, today and tomorrow. Did I really understand the art and science of saying no?

Psychology and neuroscience teach us that the human brain has a negativity bias, meaning that negative stimuli, such as being told “no,” have much stronger and more enduring emotional impact than positive signals of similar magnitude. It’s no wonder, then, that we have difficulty saying no. Normal people don’t like to hurt other people’s feelings and fear doing damage to relationships and their own reputation.

Vanessa Patrick, professor of marketing at the University of Houston, wrote an entire book about saying no. In The Power of Saying No, Patrick makes a point that should resonate with everyone who has ever put together a budget: Each decision involves a trade-off, and so when we say yes to something, we are implicitly saying no to something else. The inverse is also true, and this is where I find consolation and courage: Saying no to one thing means saying yes to something else. If that something else is a core value, a strategic imperative or a key priority, saying no becomes an enabling, dare I say, noble act.

In Baltimore, Outcome Budgeting gave me and the mayors I worked for the plans that allowed us to use “no” in service of the greater good. Funding was pooled around “priority outcomes,” such as better schools and safer streets, and services competed for funding based on their alignment to the outcomes and evidence of results. The trade-offs were clear: We closed underused recreation centers to expand reading programs, made the police marine unit seasonal to add violence interrupter sites and forced a mentoring program to find private funding to give more young people summer jobs. These were all tough, contested choices, and yet even those who were told no understood why because the organization’s goals had been spelled out and the decision rubric was transparent.

Much has been written about how to say no in a way that conveys conviction and maintains relationships. An effective no comes from a place of empowerment, not helplessness or apology. Instead of saying, “I can’t approve your new position because we don’t have money,” say (politely and confidently), “I’m not approving new positions until I feel comfortable that we are on track to meet our long-term financial goals.” Be as specific about those goals as you can and honest about the financial forecast.

A popular alternative to no is “yes, if.” This approach can spark creativity and open a mutually beneficial negotiation. Krista Morrison, the Kansas City Budget Director, tells of being alarmed when her council told her it wanted to use $30 million in an unappropriated fund balance for a new violence reduction program. Instead of trying to stop the council, she worked with members on alternatives that would be more financially viable, as well as started a conversation about increasing the city’s reserves from two months to three months of operating expenses.

Explaining to someone that your no is really a yes in disguise probably won’t make them feel any better but take to heart that no is not negativity; it is a moment of clear choice. For local government officials, the power of no could be what separates achieving their highest aspirations from sinking into a financial abyss.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP, other members of the global EY organization, or Barrett and Greene, Inc.

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