Traffic in the City of Kelsey

Vernon Colbourne

ACC 574

George Holbrook

June 22, 2015

The City of Kelsey’s mayor has identified a need to increase funding for the city highways. The reason for this request is the traffic issues the city has seen in the past couple of years. Those traffic issues are road congestion and traffic accidents. This change ultimately affects the City of Kelsey current budget fiscal cycle. The mayor deemed it appropriate to get the city’s budget director involved. The focus of the fiscal budget should be on how additional funds can be added to the fiscal year budget. The most likely revenue source for additional funding will come from the increase in gas taxes. The budget director will have to focus their attention on how well the citizens will respond to the tax increase. The budget director needs to set goals for the budget. Once the goals are set, the city’s budget director meets with the City of Kelsey officials to discuss current and future city policies (Apollo Group, Inc, 2011).

Gas Tax Increase

The city’s gas tax is at a current rate of 5 cents per gallon (Apollo Group, Inc, 2011). If the proposed budget is approved, the current gas tax will increase to a staggering 20 cents. The budget director understands this will be a hard one for citizens to swallow. Therefore, other areas of the budget may be compromised as well. One option is requesting a lower tax increase because the City of Kelsey’s population has grown.

Citizens’ Involvement

To determine what other areas of the budget can be modified will little to no affect, the budget director should identify unnecessarily spent funds and eliminate those programs for which the funds were allocated for (Smith & Lynch, 2004). The best way to make this determination is to conduct a citizen’s survey. This is an effective method because citizens are concerned about how much of the funding, mostly paid taxes, is allocated to programs (Nollenburger, Maher, Beach, & McGee, 2012). Keeping citizens involved will likely play a role in their acceptance of the tax increase. By involving the City of Kelsey’s citizens, this will help build trust and increase accountability. Increasing accountability stresses how citizens have some control or influence over the creation of the fiscal budget (Nollenburger, Maher, Beach, & McGee, 2012).

The budget director will have to decide on which avenues to take to prepare, execute, and evaluate the fiscal budgeting cycle. In relation to citizen surveys, the budget director will need to think of what kind of survey should be used and how it will be dispersed. According to Nollenburger, Maher, Beach, & McGee (2012), citizen surveys have a long history of being a useful tool for identifying citizens’ budget preferences. In addition to citizens’ surveys, town hall meetings should be held to get better input from the citizens and to further educate them about the proposed budget. The budget director understands it is her job and the City of Kelsey’s government official’s job to educate, rouse bring interest, and to involve citizens any way possible (Nollenburger, Maher, Beach, & McGee, 2012).

Budget Approaches

Once the road to be taken has been chosen in preparation for the fiscal budget, the budget director will need to carefully select a budgeting approach that will best suit the fiscal budget and will help produce effective results. Even though the chosen approach is important, it is more important that the budget director devote valuable time preparing the budget. The budget director needs to properly identify funds that can be allocated elsewhere .Therefore, resulting in elimination of those programs. The best budgeting approach to take to aide in preparing the City of Kelsey’s fiscal budget is incremental budgeting. This approach is also called line item budgeting. Line -item budgeting is the easiest and less time- consuming of them all. The basic function of line item budgeting is merely increasing and decreasing budget items amounts from the previous fiscal budget year.

Using the line-item budget approach allows the budget director to easily see how and where funds were spent and what programs qualify for elimination. Line item budgeting helps identify items necessary to operate for the upcoming fiscal budget year (Smith & Lynch, 2004). An example of a necessary item for the operation of the City of Kelsey includes salaries for public workers such as firefighters and police officers. Line item budgeting will allow the budget director to have more control over the government’s budget. In addition, the budget director will focus more on policy issues and how funds of the budget are allocated (Smith & Lynch, 2004).

Program budgeting is an approach that will help eliminate programs during the preparation of the new fiscal budget cycle. This approach will help the budget director focus on what programs should and should not exist. In addition, it will help identify how funds are allocated among the remaining programs (Wilson, Katteleus, & Reck, 2007).

Line-item budget differs greatly from the other budget approaches. Unlike line, item budgeting, performance budgeting focuses more on programs and their effectiveness. It compares the input and outputs of the program. The planning-programming-budgeting approach focuses on how the allocations of funds are managed. Zero-based budgeting is time consuming. Zero-based budgeting requires that allocations of funds be justified every fiscal budget cycle. It details what and how changes are made from previous budget decisions (Wilson, Katteleus, & Reck, 2007). This approached uses several analysis techniques. An example of a technique is cost-benefit analysis (Smith & Lynch, 2004).

Budget Summary

Once the fiscal budget proposal is presented city administration must be given ample time to review the budget. After the review of the budget has been completed, the budget director must prepare a budget summary. This part of the fiscal budget proposal is very important (Smith & Lynch, 2004). The summary must include revenues sources. Most importantly, the budget director needs to ensure the summary includes tax revenues such as the tax increase on gas per gallon. Other items to include in the budget summary are cash surplus from the previous year, proposed expenditures, and cash surplus for the budget year (Smith & Lynch, 2004). With hopes of the fiscal budget proposal being approved and the citizens’ survey show majority support the tax increase to support the need for solutions for the traffic issues, the mayor of Kelsey and city officials mandates the tax increase of 15 cents bringing the new tax rate on gas to 20 cents.

Solutions for Traffic Issues

At this point, the city mayor and his city officials can begin drafting a plan to deal with the overwhelming number of accidents that have occurred throughout the city. The major indentified congestion and speeding as the major contribution to the accidents. One of his solutions for this problem is widening the highways for the most congested areas within the city. Not only will this solution help reduce congestion; it will also make easy routes into businesses and shopping plaza (Morello, 2013).

As mentioned earlier, speeding is another contribution to the traffic issues. The mayor will propose that speeding cameras are placed on major roadways with high speed limits and few traffic lights. Studies show speed cameras are only effective and aid in reducing speed related accidents on roads medium to high speed limits and few traffic lights (Effectiveness of speed, 2010). Speed cameras are one of the tools used to force drivers to reduce their speed (Perez, Olmo, Tobias, & Borrell, 2007).

Conclusion

Preparing a budget is not an easy task. Not just anyone can do it alone. The mayor made the right decision by getting the city’s budget director involved to help prepare the fiscal and identify funds budget to deal with the current traffic issues. It is imperative the steps in creating a fiscal budget are followed through. As mentioned earlier, getting citizens involved is crucial to a budget’s success. Nollenberger, Maher, and McGee (2012) stated, “The contingent choice technique for assessing the priorities of citizens in the budget process has the potential to enhance the role of citizens in our representative democracy.” The mayor and city officials will not know if the proposed budget will be a success until the evaluation is completed after its implementation of the budget.

References
Apollo Group, Inc. (2011). City of Kelsey. Annual budget for the fiscal year 2005-06. Retrieved from ACC/574 –Public Budgeting course website.

Apollo Group, Inc (2011). Comprehensive annual financial report for the year ended June 2005. Retrieved from ACC/574-Public Budgeting course website.
Effectiveness of speed enforcement through fixed speed cameras: A time series study.

(2010).Injury Prevention, 16(1), 12-16.

Morello, R. (2013). Methods of reducing traffic congestion. Retrieved from

http://www.ehow.com/info_8077831_methods-reducing-traffic-congestion.html.

Nollenberger, K., Maher, C., Beach, P., & McGee, M. (2012). Budget prorates and community

Perceptions of service qualities and importance. Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting

and Financial Management, 24(2), 255-277.

Perez, K., Olmo, M.M., Tobias, A., & Borrell, C. (2007). Reducing road traffic injuries:

Effectiveness of speed cameras in an urban setting. Am J Public Health, 97(9), 1632-

1637. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2006.093195.

Smith, R.W. & Lynch, T.D. (2004). Public budgeting in America (5th e.d.). Upper Saddle River

N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Wilson, E.R., Kattelus, S.C., & Reck, J.L. (2007). Accounting for governmental and nonprofit

entities (14th e.d.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Irwin