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!

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 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.

 

 

Milwaukee County wins Distinguished Budget Presentation Award

Milwaukee County received notice on July 8 that it had received the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from the Government Finance Officers’ Association of America (GFOA). The GFOA represents public finance officials throughout the United States and Canada, and its mission is to “…enhance and promote the professional management of governmental financial resources by identifying, developing, and advancing fiscal strategies, policies, and practices for the public benefit”.

The Distinguished Budget Presentation Award “..encourages state and local governments to prepare budget documents of the very highest quality that reflect both the guidelines established by the National Advisory Council on State and Local Budgeting and the GFOA’s best practices on budgeting and then to recognize individual governments that succeed in achieving that goal”.

Achievement of this award was one of the 2014 performance measures for the Office of Performance, Strategy & Budget. This award is issued annually. This is the first time Milwaukee County has received this award since 1990.

 

County Making Progress towards Implementation of LEAN

DAS-PSB was awarded financing through the 2014 innovation fund to implement a countywide LEAN initiative. LEAN is a process improvement practice that helps organizations function more efficiently by critically analyzing burdensome processes, including those that are administrative and those that directly impact our constituents. By streamlining and improving these processes, the County expects to improve the value and sustainability of its core services.

A cross-department workgroup of individuals involved in a particular process gather and, with the help of independent facilitators, map out the steps of the process and then investigate which steps should be changed to improve that process. Steps that actually provide value to customers and the organization are kept and possibly improved. For instance, a group of individuals who are involved in the process of issuing a permit will gather and look at which steps of the permitting process could be modified so that it requires less time and work to issue the permit.

The County has engaged a consultant to help set up an ongoing LEAN effort. This will include a steering committee, which will review requests for processes to be analyzed; and a group of facilitators who will work with cross-departmental teams to examine processes and develop options to make efficiency improvements. The County’s goal is to emulate the successes realized with LEAN in Brown County, Wisconsin and the City of Denver, Colorado, and to empower employees to provide value to constituents through a culture of continuous process improvement.

You may click here to review a presentation on LEAN management that provides more detailed information on the County’s LEAN journey.

 

An Overview of Milwaukee County’s Public Safety Function

At the core of Milwaukee County’s mission is the promotion of Personal Safety. The County’s Public Safety Function includes two Offices and two Departments whose core duties strive to fulfill this important role.

1.  The Office of the District Attorney promotes public peace and safety by just and vigorous prosecution. 
2.  The Office of the County Sheriff is charged with providing a safe and secure environment across the County, especially within County properties 
3. The House of Correction receives and maintains custody of all sentenced inmates in Milwaukee County for periods not exceeding one year. The facility focuses on providing job training and other rehabilitative efforts to reduce recidivism.
4. The Medical Examiner is charged with investigating and determining the cause, circumstances and manner in each case of sudden, unexpected or unusual deaths.

In the 2014 Adopted Milwaukee County Budget, the Public Safety function accounts for more than 1,300 County positions (a quarter of the Countywide total), $165 million in expenditures, and $140 million in tax levy. The tax levy dedicated to this function is more than one-half of the County’s total tax levy of $279 million.

For a detailed breakdown of the funding of each of these offices, please click here to view an infographic we have prepared.

Below is an interactive Prezi presentation showing the organizational structure of the Public Safety function and it’s component units.

2013 Performance Data Submitted to ICMA

Milwaukee County is a member of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) Center for Performance Measurement. The County joined this program in 2012. The Center for Performance Measurement tracks several hundred activity data and performance measures in a wide variety of major service areas. In Milwaukee County, these service areas include:

• Parks & Recreation
• Sustainability
• Information Technology
• Human Resources
• Risk Management
• Procurement
• Facilities Management
• Highway Maintenance
• Fleet Management
• Housing Programs

On March 17, the Office for Performance, Strategy and Budget submitted (thanks to the cooperation of several departments) the 2013 data for these service areas to ICMA. The ICMA compiles these data sets from dozens of cities and counties across the Country and makes them available to program participants. This data will be used to evaluate our performance against peer jurisdictions, such as Miami-Dade County, FL; Bernalillo County, NM; Alameda County, CA; and Fairfax County, VA; that also participate in the program.

Look for additional information on performance measures and comparisons with peer jurisdictions in future blog posts!

An Overview of Milwaukee County’s Transportation Function

Milwaukee County’s transportation function is served by one department, the Department of Transportation, whose mission is “providing excellence in the construction and maintenance of the physical infrastructure that provides for the public’s health and safety.”

The Milwaukee County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) is a diverse Department charged with developing and maintaining Milwaukee County’s vast infrastructure needs based on the diverse talent and qualifications of its staff. There are five distinct divisions within the Department, each with a unique role in serving the needs of the County. The Department consists of the:

1. Airports, which runs General Mitchell International Airport, Lawrence J. Timmerman Airport, and the former WI 440th Air Refueling Wing base, now known as the Milwaukee Regional Business Park
2. Director’s Office, which provides essential management and support to the other DOT divisions
3. Fleet Management, which maintains and purchases vehicles, fuel, and parts for Milwaukee County’s more than 2,200 vehicle inventory
4. Highways, which plans and maintains County, and State highways
5. Transit Services, which administrates public transportation services through both fixed route and para transit services.

The largest tax levy component within MCDOT is the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS), at approximately $18.5 million.  Both MCDOT and MCTS continually strive to balance the needs of the transit users, employers whose employees rely on a dependable transit system, and the tax payers. In contrast, the Airport Division is funded entirely by user fees and other indirect revenues such as concessions on rental car operations and parking; the Highway Maintenance Division is almost entirely funded by the State of Wisconsin through reimbursement of costs to maintain the freeway system and State trunk highways. The Fleet Management Division has a net levy return of nearly $1 million due to charges for debt service on County-owned vehicles.

In the 2014 Adopted Milwaukee County Budget, the Transportation function accounts for more than 450 County positions, $228 million in expenditures, and $18.6 million in tax levy.

For a detailed breakdown of the funding of each of these offices, please click here to view an infographic we have prepared.

Below is an interactive Prezi presentation showing the organizational structure of the Public Safety function and it’s component units.