MIN CHC 1999-09-08 - Laserfiche WebLink

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IRVINE: If you wanted to, but generally speaking, model County Charters have an Internal Auditor provision because it's something that, maybe, a County government wouldn't necessarily want to do if they were trying to cover something up, and I don't see where Legislative Auditor really covers fiscal auditing. Now maybe, if we had program budgeting, then that might do for program review, which is the other issue that comes to play in here, but we don't have much auditing going on as far as I can tell. TAKAHASHI: Not internally, because at this point, with the limited resources that we have, we're not able to set aside, or commit, the resources to this program. Things are very tight right now. Hopefully, when things get better, we can initiate a program but right now, when we set priorities, I don't believe new programs are taking that much of a priority. I mean, we have existing programs that are suffering. We need to bolster them first before we embark on new programs. IRVINE: Do you think, if you did real program budgeting, that that could suffice for this program review that they're trying to throw out of the Charter, or argue about? TAKAHASHI: Maybe I can explain to you what we've done. The 1999-2000 budget, we finally got away from what we call "line item" budgeting. We are budgeting at a higher level, is what we call "object level" budgeting, so you don't see the little bitty expenditure proposals. You see lump sum. The next move, which we're initiating beginning next week, we will be emphasizing more program write-ups like more measurable standards, so hopefully, the focus on budgeting will be service levels rather than paper, pencil, paper clips. We're asking agencies to look at their program write-ups, see whether they can quantify their performances, what they expect to do, and what they actually were able to accomplish, and hopefully, in the long run, what are some of the shortcomings we recognize and try to rectify. But we don't expect it to happen over night, but we're beginning that process with this forthcoming budget. RAY: Daryl, did you have a question? KUROZAWA: No. RAY: Any other questions for Harry on this point? TAKAHASHI: On the next one, Preparation and Submission of Budget and Capital Program: It's a minor thing. Right now the Charter requires the Mayor to make copies available to interested parties, and the document can run two hundred and some odd pages, and often times, people are not interested in the whole document. They just want to see summaries so the proposal is to provide that the Clerk make copies available since they run the copies. We generally submit our proposals to the 30