Dunwoody city hall is all abuzz. Seems that the mayor and folks on council have un-retreated and decided there will be a new budget. And a new way of getting it. This entails two major changes. First, zero-based budgeting and second a revenue-neutral model.
A zero-based budget ensures that needless bureaucracy falls away as it becomes unneeded as demonstrated by its own inability to justify its existence. In other cases where outright elimination is not warranted there remains a once-a-year opportunity to "right size" elements of the bureaucracy. The hope is this will put an end to a fifteen year run of cancerous expansion at city hall.
The revenue neutral model ensures that as the tax digest increases as it has for each of the last fifteen years, the true beneficiaries will be the tax paying residents since the millage rate will be adjusted, downward, to reflect the fiscal prudence promised at the outset. Any budgetary increases must pass through the zero-based budgeting process and cannot be added with a dismissive wave of the hand and a mumbling of "inflation" as is currently done.
This will result in real people, with real faces, and real names, standing before the city to plead the case for their wants, to be held up against our needs. When this city was being formed a commitment to fiscal responsibility was a major plank in the platform, and with these new budgetary processes that commitment may finally be kept.
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