BEST PRACTICES

Both Pottstown Borough and the Pottstown School District publish budgets on their Web sites.  But both could be improved to be more informative and useful.

Pottstown Borough recently published a 35-page budget document for 2010, but it is difficult if not impossible to decifer. (Look for it on the Pottstown Borough Government - Budget page of this Web site.) It omits such basics as the function of each department, the number of employees, and what they do. There’s no way to figure out how much each employee is paid.  The school district’s published budget is much easier to understand, but it similarly lacks detail.

Properly formatted, a budget can illuminate the functions of government better than any other resource.  The City of Bethlehem publishes a well-organized budget that outlines the function of each department, the achievements of each department in the previous year, and goals for the coming year.  The budget lists the number of people employed and their salaries.  It includes a thumbnail description of all government grants.  Although the 334-page document is detailed, it is easy to navigate.

For example, look at the Table of Contents page, below.

Each function of government is clearly differentiated.

The number of employees in each department is listed.

Now let’s look at an example of how the budget is detailed for administration, pages 31 through 34 of the Bethlehem Budget:

Page 31 contains a simple graph showing how the department is organized.

Page 32 describes the department, lists its goals and objectives, and prior year achievements.

Page 33 lists the number of employees in the department (by job title), and their salaries.  Besides personnel expenses, page 33 all lists all the purchases made by the department.

Page 34 provides the details for the purchases of the department.

Bethlehem lumps together all the fringe benefits such as medical, life, and long-term disability insurance, Social Security payments, and pension payments under the heading of General Expenses.

To view Bethlehem’s entire budget, click here.

The City of Erie provides an even more detailed list of its employees as part of its budget which it calls the Personnel Roster.  The Personnel Roster lists each employee (by job title), whether the employee is full-time or part-time, and the employee’s salary.  Erie calculates Social Security, health insurance, workmen’s compensation and pension payments by department.

To view Erie’s Personnel Roster, click here.

A major goal of Pottstown Borough and the Pottstown School District should be to search for best practices in reporting information -- especially budget information --  and incorporate those practices on their Web sites.