2015 Budget – Comparison of Program Areas

The 2015 Adopted Budget Narrative provides information about the services that Milwaukee County provides broken out into distinctive program areas, which represent distinct services provided to our constituents. The narrative allocates these programs between different service provision types, and by the Strategic Outcome to which they most closely match.

Service Provision Type: The Budget Narrative indicates whether the program areas are mandated, committed, discretionary, or administrative in nature. Definitions of these terms include:

• Mandated: Milwaukee County is required by State Statute or Federal Law to provide these services. Generally it is up to the County to determine service levels and quality, but the services must be provided at some basic level.
• Committed: These are services that are provided through a contract or other long-standing relationship. The County could in theory eliminate these programs only after the existing contract expires.
• Discretionary: These are programs the County provides that are not required by State Statute or Federal Law. In some cases there may be contracts included in these programs, but in general the entire program could be eliminated if the County so chose.
• Administrative: These are generally internal services that support other government operations. For instance the Fleet Management program area in the Department of Transportation provides vehicle maintenance and capital replacement for the Parks, Sheriff, Airport, and other departments, without which those departments could not provide their services to County residents.

In the 2015 Adopted Budget, mandated services consume 61 percent of the County’s available General Resources, which includes property tax levy, sales tax, State Shared Revenues, and other countywide sources. These services include 37 percent of the County’s net expenditures and more than half of all budgeted positions. Detailed information about program areas sorted by service provision type can be found in this report. (.pdf document).

Strategic Outcome: The Budget Document also indicates to which Strategic Outcome the program area is most closely aligned. The County’s Strategic Outcomes are planks of the County’s mission statement, which reads:

Milwaukee County Government will provide high quality, responsive services that enhance self-sufficiency,

The data below shows that Personal Safety programs consume the largest share of available General Resources, at 44 percent. This is in line with the share of mandated programs listed above, as many of the County’s mandated law enforcement programs require the largest allocation of General Resources. Personal Safety programs also include the largest share of FTE positions at 36 percent.

Detailed information about program areas sorted by strategic outcome can be found in this report.. (.pdf document)

 

2015 Adopted Operating Budget Narrative Now Available

The 2015 Adopted Operating Budget is now available online. The entire document is available to download on the 2015 Budget Documents page of the budget blog.

The departmental narratives and various sections and supplements for the narrative will be available on the County’s website during the week of January 12. Simply click on our page on the County’s website to view these documents!

2015 Adopted Budget Summary Documents Now Available

The process of creating the 2015 Adopted Operating and Capital Budget narrative is nearing completion. The documents will be placed on the County’s website once the entire document is complete.

In the meantime, some sections of the narrative, including the adopted capital budget, are already complete and are now available on the 2015 Budget Documents page.

Please click here for a broad graphical view of the 2015 Adopted Budget.

County Receives Letter of Support for Elections Initiative

On October 10, Milwaukee County received a letter of support from the City of Milwaukee’s Election Commission for its 2015 initiative to establish uniform voting equipment across the County’s municipalities.

The initiative would have the County purchase new election machines for each municipality, plus additional voting machines for individuals with disabilities. Municipalities would then reimburse the County for 30 percent of the capital cost and enter into a memorandum of understanding with the City of Milwaukee to provide election programming services. As noted in a previous post, this initiative will result in a net savings (including the capital purchase) for County taxpayers of nearly $3.2 million over the next 12 years, plus additional savings for municipal taxpayers for reduced capital and programming costs.

The letter of support from the City of Milwaukee Election Commission can be viewed here.

Public Policy Forum Issues Budget Analysis

The Public Policy Forum, a non-profit, independent research organization that analyzes key public policy topics in Wisconsin, has issued its annual review of the County Executive’s 2015 Recommended Budget.

The analysis can be found here.

2015 Budget E-Procurement Initiative

The 2015 Recommended Budget includes significant changes in how Milwaukee County’s procurement process operates.  Once implemented, these changes will result in cost savings of as much as $1.4 million annually.  One of these changes will be the installation and implementation of a county wide “e-Procurement” system. This system will allow for centralization of the existing procurement contracts, approval processes and various other technologies.  Milwaukee County will gain operational efficiencies and grow organizational purchasing power.  To accomplish some of these tasks SciQuest’s e-Procurement solution was chosen to drive collaboration and change across the system as they have proven track record, low cost ownership, ease of integration and transferable technology.

The current procurement process is decentralized with limited countywide price agreements, and a  manual, paper-intensive process.  The current procurement system has limited visibility of the approval process and no ability to base approvals upon dollar level, category, vendor or account.

Using a new, robust platform coupled with the ability to source contracts through the expanded buying power of the County will provide for:

• increased contract compliance through “preferred” vendor visibility via price catalogs
• identification of opportunities for savings and leveraging County spent
• improved efficiencies; same day POs
• paperless process
• total spend analytics
• enhanced and significant level authorizations by dollar level and commodity
• increased transparency on commodity expenditures
• automated bid and quote system

DAS Procurement Department, in collaboration with internal business partners and stakeholder input, plans to go live with SciQuest e-Procurement in 2015.

 

 

 

 

Collaboration on Elections to Reduce County and Municipal Long-Term Costs

The 2015 Recommended Budget includes an intergovernmental initiative that will enhance collaboration, improve election night reporting, and reduce taxpayer costs at the County and Municipal levels. An appropriation of $1,845,000 is included for the purchase new voting tabulator machines for each municipality. Under the proposed agreement, Municipalities would reimburse the County for 30% of the election machine costs. The County would recover its initial investment and save additional money over a 12-year period through reduced election costs by utilizing the City of Milwaukee’s Election Commission to program the machines.

By state law, Milwaukee County is responsible for the cost of programming voting machines for all elections except municipal elections. Under the current service model, the County would pay an estimated $2,000,000 per 4-year election cycle on programming. As part of the intergovernmental agreement, the City of Milwaukee will provide programming services for the County and all 18 municipalities. As the City of Milwaukee will only charge the actual cost of providing the service, the County and all municipalities will see cost savings. The following chart shows the projected net fiscal impact of the proposed initiative.

The initial investment in election machines will be recouped within the first 4-year election cycle, leading to over $3 million in net savings for the County over the next three 4-year election cycles. Each municipality will also see savings on election programming costs by utilizing the City of Milwaukee’s services.

The full 2015 Recommended Budget Narrative for Elections can be accessed here. The narrative for the election machine capital project can be found on page 187 of this document.

Business Plan for the new Department of Emergency Management

The 2015 Recommended Budget includes the creation of a new Department of Emergency Management. The new department is being created to bring emergency services into one consolidated management structure to improve service and collaboration with municipalities and other regional first-responder agencies. A recent blog post explored some of the issues with the County’s current structure, which you can view here.

The new department brings together four program areas with $11 million of expenditures and 65 staff positions, which is a significant undertaking. The new department would be created on January 1, 2015. Therefore, the County has created a business plan to get the new department “up and running” as quickly as possible. Click here to view the business plan.

Highlights of the plan include:

• The mission statement for the new department will be: “Milwaukee County’s integrated Office of Emergency Management stands as a leader in delivering modern services that prepare and protect the lives and properties of our communities.”
• A new Director position will be created in the October 2014 cycle of the County Board of Supervisors, so that an individual can be identified and hired prior to January 1. This will enable the department to have executive leadership in place on day one, ready to work towards the department’s mission statement.
• Fiscal and administrative staff will be centralized along with departmental leadership during 2015; however the Department of Health and Human Services will continue to provide support during the first quarter of 2015.
• A new supervisory position is created in the 911 communications/dispatch function to manage the 25 positions in that program area.

The Department of Emergency Management’s 2015 budget narrative can be found here.

2015 Requested Budget Summary Now Available

Milwaukee County is required by State Statute to distribute a summary of all budget requests annually. By Statute the summary includes a variety of information such as total expenditures, revenues, tax levy, outstanding debt, capital projects, and capital financing. The summary is available on the Office of Performance, Strategy & Budget website.

Highlights of the summary include:

• A total of $331.3 million in property tax levy was requested, which would represent an increase over 2014 of $52 million or 19 percent. The largest single increase was in the Office of the Sheriff, which requested $28.3 million in additional tax levy funds.
• A total of $91.4 million in capital projects was requested, an increase over 2014 of $11.4 million or 14 percent.
• Approximately $1.42 billion in operating expenditures were requested, an increase of $260 million or 22 percent.
• County departments and offices requested a total of 4,200 full-time positions, a net increase of 72 over 2014. The largest single increase was in the Office of the Sheriff, which requested 181 additional full-time positions.

 

How the County Budgets for Information Technology

Milwaukee County departments allocated a total  of nearly $19 million in spending for information technology items and services in their 2015 requested operating budgets; with another $5.4 million in capital expenditures. Of the total requested operating expenditures, $13.5 million or 71 percent are in departments other than the Information Management Services Division of the Department of Administrative Services (DAS-IMSD), which is the County’s central IT services department.

The County has decentralized the process for the procurement and management of information technology. Budgets for the purchase of hardware, software, consulting, or other IT-related items are provided to individual departments. Departments may utilize these funds to purchase any IT-related items, so long as they stay within their expenditure budgets.

The current decentralized structure has led to:

• Multiple versions and licenses of the same software package across departments. DAS-IMSD estimates that the County currently has more than 10,000 software applications and/or application versions for its 4,600 employees.
• Different departments use different systems to do the same thing. For instance, several different software solutions are utilized across the County to manage facility maintenance efforts. None of the solutions talk to one another, meaning departments cannot share information on maintenance needs; the County does not have comprehensive information on its maintenance efforts; and many of the solutions do not provide sufficient data for performance measurement or other analysis.
• Individual departments often purchase a solution and then inform DAS-IMSD that it needs to be supported. This sets DAS-IMSD up to fail its customers when it is not brought in on the front end of the purchase and/or it may not have the resources or ability to support the department in the timeframe desired.
• By failing to view IT from a countywide viewpoint, it is extremely difficult to provide adequate, cost-effective, and appropriate human and capital resources in DAS-IMSD.

This decentralized structure does not conform to budgeting best practices. The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) has developed best practices for IT budgeting and project management. In summary, the GFOA recommends centralizing IT budgets within the organization’s IT agency, requiring departments to submit business cases for significant IT projects, and taking an organization-wide view of how IT is utilized.

This centralized model could be very beneficial to Milwaukee County by:

• Reducing IT costs to the County by utilizing enterprise licensing and bulk purchasing instead of individual solutions or items.
• Reducing IT costs by not purchasing unneeded solutions or services.
• Improving IT efficiency by using common solutions for shared or similar needs.
• Improving IT functionality by ensuring that DAS-IMSD is aware of business needs and can support the solutions that are ultimately purchased.
• Improving business processes by requiring departments to conform to countywide IT solutions, instead of maintaining poor processes by customizing individual software packages.

The County Executive has asked the Office of Performance, Strategy and Budge analyze changes to IT budgeting and procurement processes and to make recommendations for improvement.