For many years your Taxpayers Association has suggested that Martin County, The City of Stuart and our School Board adopt budget processes and procedures that allow our citizens a clear, understandable and reliable view of what we are funding our Governments to do and to provide. Our suggestions include long term, multi-year budgets and concise definitions of why taxes are levied and how they are spent. To this end we again make our concerns known to all and strongly request that these suggestions be vetted and examined.

We begin with spending. Government spending must be curbed, prioritized and limited. Spending has to be prioritized by what is essential, what we have to do, what we need to do and then to what we want to do. Spending should be limited to no more than inflation plus our growth rate. Personnel costs are by far the largest portion of our budget. Management costs contribute to these expenditures and require that our administrations be performance based. We need benchmarks to measure the delivery of management. We have to institute a system of shared efficiencies that eliminates duplication. Turf protection has to be eliminated. We must better anticipate our needs and avoid the constant surprises. We have to move quickly to control health care costs, insurance costs and energy costs. We should require an independent audit of our fiscal and program accountability.

To accomplish these goals we have to closely examine our process. We suggest zero based budgeting. With defined core purposes we can prioritize our needs and demand results. We can measure performance, demand accountability and transparency. We should require quarterly reporting made much more feasible and cost efficient by modern technology. Every work station in our government now has desk top computers with advance programming. We can chart our fiscal history and make expenditure and revenue data available to all citizens. We should reward performance and punish waste.

Our adopted levels of public services drive a lot of what we spend. By adopting an Activity Base Costing program we can assign costs of overhead, energy, meeting time and service level budgeting. This would provide the ability to track and forecast both revenue and expenditures. Focus on changes in cost that result from changes in activities. By dividing the total cost by the unit of output we can easily determine the cost of service delivery and make intelligent decisions on funding.

In the ever worsening economic climate we face, it is high time to look at every thing with an unprejudiced eye.