Spokane County used to publish 150-page budgets. Now they’re three or four pages long

Two years ago, Spokane County’s published budget was 168 pages.

With a quick google search, almost anyone can find it. The 2020 budget shows expenditure and income breakdowns for each department. It records every employee by title and enables the reader to compare staff increases and reductions. Most of the sections even include a brief written description that will allow a layperson to at least get an overview of what a chartered accountant is, or how property excise taxes work.

Few people will ever voluntarily peruse a Spokane County budget, but the few who wish to keep a close watch on spending in 2021 or 2022 will not find a budget of 150 pages. Many of the details that the old county budgets had have disappeared.

The county’s published 2021 budget is two pages, and the 2022 budget, approved by county commissioners on December 13, is three pages, although each page is a page longer if you count the individual one-sided general fund breakdowns.

Gary Petrovich, Spokane County’s chief financial officer, said the move to minimalist budgets was not a deliberate change in policy or an attempt to reduce transparency. He said it was mainly a technology problem.

“We changed the budget systems and that gave us a bit of a problem,” said Petrovich. “We’re still struggling with that.”

Petrovich said the county used a software program called PeopleSoft for budgeting before 2021. With PeopleSoft, the office could easily create a large, detailed budget. The human still had to put together the final document, but the software made it easy.

Now the county is using a software program called Questica. Petrovich said Questica has not yet allowed the county to compile its traditional 150-page budget documents.

The aim is to present more detailed budgets in the near future, said Petrovich.

“We are moving in that direction,” he said, adding that the county should publish a more thorough budget in February. “We hope to remedy this very quickly.”

Spokane district commissioner Al French said he would like the district to re-publish detailed budgets.

“I really like the way we did it when I was in town,” French said, referring to his time on Spokane councilor. “I think we will probably have a conversation next year about getting back to more details, not only in front of the board but also in public.”

Petrovich also said that it was difficult to draw up a more detailed budget due to the personnel challenges. He said he only had two employees and that his department no longer had the capacity it used to. Petrovich noted that two of the county’s household analysts, each with over 30 years of experience and how to create longer budgets, have recently retired.

“There was still a lot of calculation going on, but you had more staff here and more experienced people working on it,” he explained.

The county held three public budget hearings in the fall. Watching these meetings and reading the hearing slideshows posted on the county’s website will enable a resident to better understand what the county’s income and expenses are like.

Spokane County’s Commissioner Josh Kerns said the commissioners added the public round tables in 2017 to increase transparency.

“We’re really trying to be as open as we can and open the curtain on how we’re budgeting,” Kerns said.

The county also posted several spreadsheets on its website on Friday after The Spokesman Review asked why the county stopped posting detailed budgets. These tables contain much of the information that was missing in 2021 and 2022, and give residents a better way to keep track of the county’s spending over the past three years.

By combining the information provided in the short budget, the slideshows, and the recently published spreadsheets, a reader can find out much of the information the county provided in its annual published budget.

But it’s still harder to track the county’s spending than it was two years ago, and even before 2021, Spokane County’s finances were pretty straightforward compared to other local governments.

For example, Spokane Valley’s 2022 budget starts with a 14-page preamble from City Manager Mark Calhoun.

Calhoun goes through the highlights of the budget. He explains that the city is hiring five new employees and describes what they will do. Calhoun also provides general budget context – an essential context for anyone who does not attend city council meetings regularly – and writes extensively on Spokane Valley’s general financial philosophies and overarching goals.

If Calhoun’s explanations only whet the reader’s appetite, there are nearly a hundred pages of numbers right afterwards. A reader can keep track of all of the city’s income and expenses. So much detail is in the budget that a reader can see that the Valley spent $ 50,000 on the Wilbur Road sidewalk from Boone Avenue to Mission Avenue in 2021, and that the Spokane Valley Police Department plans to do so in 2022 Spending $ 8,000 to remove a tree and rubble from the building much behind the precinct.

Spokane’s budgets are similarly broad, but on a larger scale. The city publishes a budget with more than 1,000 pages and a compressed version with more than 100 pages. A resident may need an accounting degree to understand the 1,000-page version, but in theory it’s possible to closely track the city’s income and expenses with a quick search and a few clicks.

Spokane County all records the same information, but it is not published online, so residents would have to request public records to find most of it. Understanding the county’s finances properly takes more work.

Comparing a city and a district budget is like comparing apples and oranges, said Petrovich. Several district chiefs are elected officials who do not account to the district commissioner. The district administrations are decentralized.

“It’s easier for cities to break down activity and activity costs,” said Petrovich. “You can break down your cost structure differently than we can.”

Kerns explained that because some district departments are headed by other elected officials who do not control the district officers, the district officers do not analyze budget requests with the same level of detail as a city council.

Still, the bipartite and tripartite budgets Spokane County’s publicly shared appear to only meet the bare minimum required by state law, according to the Washington State Auditor’s Office Budgeting, Accounting and Reporting Manual.

“Budgeting is more than just an activity to comply with state laws,” says the handbook. “It’s a sophisticated process of strategic planning, communication and policy development that leads to a detailed operational plan.”