Despite Evanston’s $3 million budget deficit, an international finance group has awarded the city with the Distinguished Budget Award for meeting numerous criteria in forming the budget.
“Winning the award doesn’t mean the city has a great government, it just means the city’s budget is meeting certain standards,” said John Fishbein, Government Finance Officers Association senior manager for the award.
Those standards are 27 suggested budget criteria, including assessing community needs, priorities, challenges and opportunities, developing long-range financial planning and developing an organized process for preparing and adopting a budget, such as creating a budget calendar. Winning budgets must be proficient on 13 to 14 of the mandatory items, Fishbein said.
Many of the criteria relate to transparency and accessibility of the budget to the public. But despite this, Northwestern students don’t seem to take advantage of Evanston’s prized budget or even know much about city government at all.
McCormick sophomore Gabrielle Stroh has never been to the city website or seen the budget, she said.
“I’m not aware of Evanston’s economic situation,” she said. “I just don’t really care. I wish I knew more, but I’m not going to go out of my way to find out more.”
The Distinguished Budget Award has been in existence since 1984, and the award is granted to over 90 percent of 1,300 participating governments, Fishbein said.
“Citizens can be assured that the government meets general standards in terms of presenting their budget document,” he said.
The Evanston government worked especially hard this past year to increase community involvement with the budget before it was submitted to the Evanston City Council for review, said Martin Lyons, Evanston assistant city manager.
The city held five public meetings with citizens this past year about the budget before submitting it, Lyons said. The goal is to improve communication about the budget between the government and the people, he said. The budget’s readability and accessibility is also important for the financial community and the businesses that lend the city money.
“The idea is to make sure residents from year to year can look at our documents to know what we’re up to,” Lyons said. “The documents need to be as transparent as possible.”
