ICMA recently released a new white paper which finds that local governments throughout the United States continue to redefine themselves in an effort to meet the challenges of new financial realities, particularly in the areas of personnel, core services and programs, service partnerships, and restructuring.

Striking a Balance: Matching the Services Offered by Local Governments with the Revenue Realities, authored by Victoria Gordon, associate professor in the Department of Political Science, MPA program, and director of the Center for Local Governments at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, examines how managers can continue to provide essential services to citizens by engaging them in community prioritization and decision making.

Striking a Balance presents a summary of the current financial trends faced by communities; the strategies adopted to deal with those challenges; examples of successful citizen participation efforts, barriers to meaningful participation, along with methods and mechanisms used to overcome those barriers; and a proposed framework for essential and nonessential service prioritization that incorporates citizen collaboration and empowerment into the process.

"In extreme cases, we read headlines of municipal bankruptcy, consideration of the possibility of eliminating a police department and contracting out public safety functions, or the proposed cutbacks of municipal salaries to minimum-wage levels,” Gordon stated. She continued to say, however, that “For most managers, budgetary changes over the past five years have been recurring, but more subtle—decreases in size of workforce, delays in filling vacant positions, temporary furloughs, limits on overtime, across-the-board budgetary cuts, increased contributions from employees to pension plans and health insurance premiums, reallocating responsibilities, delaying capital improvement projects, and/or restructuring of departments.”

Garnering citizen input, according to the study results, remains the greatest challenge for local service prioritization. The paper suggests a framework for incorporating citizen involvement into the process that follows the spectrum of public participation (i.e., informing, consulting, involving, collaborating with, and empowering citizens). Intended as a discussion of the political, financial, and environmental factors that are unique to a community (rather than a one-size-fits-all approach), the framework recommendations may lead communities to find new directions for service provision and for allocating resources within the budget process.