Budgeting from scratch

11-20-2009

Blog by Emily Alpert/Voice of San Diego

Earlier this week, the San Diego Unified school board decided to go about its budget cuts in a completely different way, building the budget from scratch instead of deciding what to cut from an existing budget loaded with programs and people. It's called zero-based budgeting. School district staff balked at the idea of doing it by mid-December, the deadline for a financial report on balancing the current school year budget. But the board majority said they wanted it done eventually. The question is whether it can happen quickly enough -- and produce enough savings -- to be a worthwhile step in the middle of coping with the budget crisis. So what does it take to get to zero? I got an interesting e-mail from Florence Samuels in Santee, who wrote that she worked for the county engineer in the 1970s when it switched to zero-based budgeting. (more...)

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