08-08-11 (8-9 & 8-10) City Council Meeting including a Budget Workshop of La Porte City Council

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UNDERSTANDING THE PROPOSED BUDGET A READERS GUIDE The City of La Porte's Proposed Budget provides comprehensive information about City policies, financial structure, operations, and an organizational framework that shows how City services are maintained and improved for fiscal year 2011 -2012. The preparation of a budget is, at best, a complex process. Yet, the process affords both an interesting and challenging opportunity to reassess plans and overall goals and means for accomplishing them. It is through this effort that the budget could be the single most important policy document produced each year. The process begins many months before presentation to the Council with estimates of City expenditures, revenues and reserves to determine the City's available funds. With this groundwork, departmental expenditure requests are made and subsequently reviewed. This years' budget process began in March. The Budget serves as an operational tool and planning guide, wherein the present policies and plans for the future are presented for the scrutiny of citizens, the ultimate consumers of municipal services. The budget document includes summaries, mission statements, and organizational charts for each department. Staffing levels, a narrative explaining services, and the line item detail are all presented on a divisional basis. PROPOSED BUDGET FORMAT The document is divided into ten major sections: Budget Summaries, General Fund, Utility Fund, Enterprise Funds, Internal Service Funds, Special Revenue Funds, Capital Improvement Funds, Debt Service Funds, and the Glossary. The Budget Summaries Section includes an overall summary of the Budget and summaries of both revenues and expenditures that might interest the lay reader. Additionally, the Personnel Summary, which recaps staffing levels by division for a three -year period is included in this section. A Readers Guide The accounts of the City are organized on the basis of funds and account groups, each of which is considered to be a separate accounting entity. Each fund can be generally thought of as a small business. The operations of each fund are maintained using a set of self - balancing accounts, which comprise its assets, liabilities, fund equity, revenues, and expenditures or expenses. Resources are budgeted to the individual funds by activity and are controlled within the fund. The next four sections are the Fund Sections and are organized as follows: Fund Summary, Statement of Revenues, Department Summary, Divisional Summary and the Line Item Detail. 1 -1