The devil is usually in the details when it comes to the Haines Borough’s budget.
But the devil may be harder to find as manager David Sosa’s budget lacks many of the details previously included in the spending document.
Sosa changed the budget’s format this year, removing every department’s “expense detail worksheets” which break down costs beyond the general categories of “travel,” “professional and contractual services,” “materials and equipment” and other expenses.
Under Sosa’s new budget, each department only lists these general categories. For more than a decade, the borough budget has included a breakdown of these categories.
For example, in last year’s budget, a person could see that the administration spent $7,250 on travel and then look at the expense detail worksheets for further detail: manager and clerk attendance at the Alaska Municipal League conference ($3,150), International City/County Management Association conference ($1,800), Excursion Inlet trip ($300) and undesignated travel ($2,000).
Those details are not included under Sosa’s new format.
“My hope is that this will help us focus on overarching priorities and lead to a measured and mature conversation about priorities, mission, and resources rather than a conversation about how much paper, staples, etc. a department uses,” Sosa said.
“The key question to ask is ‘Have we allocated sufficient resources (money, personnel, material, etc.) for departments to achieve missions linked to assembly priorities?’ I would rather we focus on the forest than the trees or the shrubs, bushes, or blades of grass.”
To include the expense detail worksheets in the budget would expand the document from 130 to 200-250 pages, he said. “I think that would provide more information and possibly more transparency; I don’t know that it would increase clarity.”
At Monday’s first budget workshop, though, several assembly members balked at the lack of details.
Assembly member Ron Jackson pointed out that some of the general expense sections like “professional and contractual services” comprise large percentages of a department’s budget. He was surprised to learn, after asking Sosa, that a big chunk of the administration’s $92,000 professional and contractual services budget goes to legal fees for the borough attorney.
“That’s the kind of thing that is probably in the detail breakout,” Jackson said. “Personally, to understand this a little better, I’d like to have access to that kind of information.”
Assembly member George Campbell took exception that 20 percent of the administration’s budget was listed as “professional and contractual services” with no further explanation in the budget of what those services are.
“I’m looking at 20 percent of the budget that I have no idea where it is going. I’m uncomfortable with 20 percent of the budget being a mystery,” Campbell said.
Campbell said in an interview after the meeting that while he’d like break-out expense details for some of the categories, like professional and contractual services, he’s not concerned about restoring all the expense detail worksheets for the departments.
“There is a level of breakdown that I don’t think we really need to get into the details,” Campbell said. “Do I care that the $2,000 is whether they are flying to California or flying to Anchorage to take training? No. That’s (Sosa’s) responsibility to decide.”
Assembly member Dave Berry said in an interview while he didn’t feel including the previous level of detail was “necessary,” seeing numbers on a page allows the information to sink in and stick.
“It makes it easier. Granted it is more paperwork and more work, but it makes things easier,” Berry said.
The assembly on Monday asked Sosa to provide break-out spending details for all of the departments’ professional and contractual services, but didn’t request other information.
Chief fiscal officer Jila Stuart said she and Sosa agreed on the change to the budget format. “It’s time-consuming putting that together and it takes time away from being able to do the other stuff that we tried to do this year,” Stuart said.
That “other stuff” consisted of a one-page cover sheet for each department providing a description of the department, its mission and its objectives for the upcoming year. The cover sheets also include graphs of expenditures over the last four years, and “key metrics” for measuring a department’s efficacy or productivity.
For example, the administration’s “metric” is number of emails sent. The water department’s metric is gallons of treated water. The tourism department’s metric is sales tax receipts.
Sosa said introducing the new “cover sheet” would allow the assembly and public to easily understand how a department’s mission, goals, revenues and expenditures link together.
Chief fiscal officer Stuart said she looked at budgets for Seward, Petersburg, Wrangell, Sitka, Juneau and Skagway, and none of the municipalities provided the same level of spending detail that Haines had in previous budgets.
Sosa said if members of the public wanted to request the expense detail worksheets, they could do so in writing.