The start of January brings a new calendar every year. Beginning in 2016, plans call for it to bring Naperville a new budget as well.
Officials are expected to give a formal go-ahead sometime in July to a shift the municipal budget cycle to the calendar year, rather than the current schedule that has the fiscal year begin on May 1.
According to Rachel Mayer, the city’s finance director, Naperville is slightly behind the trend in making the change.
“This is not a new thing,” she said. “While it’s new for Naperville, I know of at least four others that have done it.”
Area taxing bodies that have switched over to a calendar-year budget in the past year or two, Mayer said, include Lockport, Evanston, Lake Zurich and the Plainfield Fire Protection District.
Discussed by officials publicly for more than a year, the pending change has been presented to those who will be most directly impacted by it, and the newly elected members of the City Council, all of whom are supportive, Mayer said.
The primary benefits of aligning the fiscal schedule with the yearly calendar are organizational. The process of planning the upcoming year’s spending will be streamlined, Mayer said, and the tax levy – which must be filed by the end of December each year – can be determined with greater transparency.
“It really helps us to be able to shorten the levy process,” she said, adding that the sequence of meetings, departmental requests, workshops and discussion also will no longer last nine months if the change is implemented. “We anticipate we’ll be able to cut that roughly in half.”
Reporting schedules will be better aligned as well, and budget planners will have less need to resort to “best-guess” work as they devise fiscal forecasts.
“From that perspective, I think it will allow us to be a little more confident in our projections,” Mayer said.
Taxpayers aren’t likely to notice anything different, but those who see to the budget planning process and make arrangements for companies doing business with the city will see change.
“There are a lot of contracts where it makes better sense,” said Erik Hallgren, financial services supervisor for the city, who predicted that the change also will facilitate the approvals needed for construction projects.
Public Works Director Dick Dublinski said the change won’t be felt in his division’s daily operations, but it will be helpful when the time comes to anticipate the following year’s spending. For one thing, he said, the year’s construction season will fall within one budget, and he’ll no longer have to make an educated guess as to how much road salt to order for the following year. Overall, he expects processes will be simpler and more precise.
“The main thing is we’re not overlapping,” Dublinski said.
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The next step in making the change, Mayer said, is gaining official endorsement from the City Council, likely including an amendment to shorten the recently started fiscal year by four months. With that portion of the year moved to the first budget on the calendar-year cycle, anticipated year-end revenues and spending should be more accurate, she said.
While some incremental costs will come with the additional audits needed for the short budget and the 2016 one that will follow it, and the approximate $10,000 cost for modifying the city’s budget software, Mayer said the city’s cost to make the change should be nominal.
“Any time there’s change, there’s going to be some, ‘How will it affect me?'” she said, reiterating that the change overall is about boosting internal efficiency.
One expenditure category that will become misaligned with the fiscal period once the shift takes effect is payroll for unionized workers. There are 13 bargaining units represented in the city’s staff, spokeswoman Linda LaCloche said, but the change in the city’s budget year shouldn’t have a substantial impact on the union contracts.
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