Your city’s budget problem is not a budget problem!

The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis The Municipal Financial Crisis

A city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

Learn from my thirty years dealing with the problems created by boundless city missions.

A city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

Learn from my thirty years dealing with the problems created by boundless city missions.

Municipal Financial Crisis

WHY ARE CITIES RUNNING OUT OF CASH?

Not because of pensions, or the economy, or bad leadership — though all three make it worse. Cities run out of money because of what they decided to do.

Mission determines goals. Goals determine activities. Activities drive costs. A city that has never defined the limits of its mission will keep taking on new activities, and each one becomes permanent: a staffing level, a labor commitment, a maintenance obligation, a constituency. By the time it reaches the budget, the decision that created it was made years earlier and is nearly impossible to reverse. Expanding scope takes a single vote. Contracting it takes renegotiating a contract.

That asymmetry is why the standard fixes don’t work. Better budgeting techniques, efficiency initiatives, transparency portals, community outreach, privatization — I spent much of thirty years in city government advocating for those, and they manage symptoms. Not one of them asks the question that produced the cost: should the city be doing this at all?

The alternative I call Budgeting for Scope: decide what the city is for, and let that decision govern what it does and what it spends. Underneath it is a principle most cities have quietly inverted — a city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

I laid out the full framework in The Municipal Financial Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Since then I’ve spent my time putting it to work: writing weekly on current municipal fights, training and advising California’s local elected officials through the California Policy Center, developing the Municipal Finance Triage Guide now used by officials across the state, and speaking to taxpayer organizations and policy groups around the country.

If your city’s budget doesn’t add up, the budget isn’t the problem.

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My Background

I ran city finance departments for three decades. I spent that time watching cities make commitments they had no way to fund, and I wrote the book explaining why they keep doing it.

My perspective on local government has been informed and influenced by my earlier career in small business consulting and banking and my interest in applied economics and philosophy. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from Golden Gate University, San Francisco.

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MYSTERY SOLVED!

This book provides an inside account of the baffling world of municipal finance. Former city finance directors rarely write books–and when they do, the books are even more rarely of practical use to a general audience. It is increasingly difficult for residents and business owners–and even city officials–to assimilate the information they are given. This book provides urgently-needed clarification to what many observers and participants view as a hopeless situation for local government.

A city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

A city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

Municipal Financial Crisis

WHY ARE CITIES RUNNING OUT OF CASH?

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My Background

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MYSTERY SOLVED!

The Municipal Financial Crisis -MARK MOSES

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A city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

A city exists for its residents; its residents do not exist for the city.

Municipal Financial Crisis

WHY ARE CITIES RUNNING OUT OF CASH?

Site Content

My Background

Help make local government discussions more productive...

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Contact Me

MYSTERY SOLVED!

The Municipal Financial Crisis -MARK MOSES

Send me a message

Social