Budget Issues

This year we need to concentrate on outcomes. Outcomes define the purpose of the City's existence. They drive the manager’s planning and controlling of the delivery of services to the community. An Outcome is the ultimate result you are trying to achieve through your goods or service delivery. It is the degree of accomplishment and it focuses on the critical end product, rather than process, requiring a high level of accountability for achieving that stated purpose. Most of the conflicting expectations are the result of process rather than outcome. Most processes are the result of planning decisions related to the system capacity.
When we consider the city system from the perspective of a physical system, the product of that system probably is most appropriately considered as the delivery of things -- services or objects -- from one provider to an appropriate recipient. Thus, at the microscopic level of a service delivery by a provider of a single service, such as brush pickup, the product of the city system would be a change in how the individual’s brush is picked up. This policy helps reduce the consumption of gas, labor spent searching for brush piles and wear on vehicles by reducing vehicle travel time. Each pickup day has a route with the specific locations of requested pickups rather than traveling every street in the city to find possible brush piles. Along with these changes came a number of concomitant changes. An, example is that residents must schedule appointments by the Monday prior to the collection date to be placed on the schedule. Thus there occurred changes in the conditions of the service as a result of the government policy. The outcome still results in brush removal and produces other beneficial outcomes, like saving gas, vehicle condition, reallocated labor costs and reduced ozone issues.