Introduction

Last week we saw how adopting a fiscal impact perspective with the operating budget improves municipal sustainability. Even without doing formal analysis on every project, local leaders can start helping the community think in terms of the long-range costs and benefits of city service levels. This week we turn to capital budgeting and capital asset management. Fiscal impact analysis will help a community align its vision with long-term sustainability. Capital assets – long-lived investments such as buildings, infrastructure or equipment are essential to delivering municipal services. They enabling the private sector to operate more effectively. Unfortunately, many communities have over invested in infrastructure given their tax base. Many also fail to properly manage these assets – either because they find that their tax base cannot support appropriate maintenance or because they don’t have simple procedures to help them get a handle on their real capital needs and costs.

Framework for Capital Budgeting

To begin with, cities should have formal policies set out in a capital budgeting process. Even when cities have good processes in place, they tend to run them in isolation. This makes it harder to learn about community needs and the economics of different ways of satisfying those needs. Without going into too much detail, capital budgeting and management process should include clear definitions of what counts as a capital project and what doesn’t. It should also include common sense policies like making sure the city covers maintenance costs first and isn’t doing deferred maintenance on some assets while trying to build new capital projects. It should look at the total lifecycle costs of the assets. That includes routine maintenance and the staff and materials to run and repair the asset. The process should also include metrics for asset performance that are related to the community outcomes the city wants to impact. There needs to be extensive citizen involvement and the process needs to be linked to other major plans like the city strategic plan and comprehensive land use plan.

Cities have been building up their capital assets over decades if not centuries. Often, documentation was an afterthought. It can be a considerable task just to inventory existing assets, but it is the necessary starting point to understand long-term costs and needs. Above the ground assets like streets, buildings, signs and street lights are relatively easy to address. Unseen assets like water mains, wastewater and storm water systems and other utilities are more difficult to inventory. Once the process is in place and the existing assets are mapped how can fiscal impact analysis support long-term sustainability?

Using Impact Analysis for Sustainability

Communities should invest in assets because they help deliver services. Impact analysis helps communities evaluate capital assets in the context of those services. This helps build a strong conceptual link between the city operating budget and the capital budget. Sustainability requires that all the costs of a service be accounted for, and they need to be covered by adequate revenues. Failure to do this is leads to deferred maintenance. They looked at operating and capital costs in isolation and didn’t try to understand how each service and its associating capital resources contribute to the total municipal budget burden. Fiscal impact analysis is a framework that can integrate these two dimensions of the capital decision. At a minimum the analysis should consider four dimensions when evaluating existing capital assets or evaluating potential new investments:

• The source of funding and its appropriateness to the life of the asset
• Potential impacts on the supply of the associated service from changing technology
• Changes in the demand for the service from demographics and economic trends
• Legal and regulatory issues that may impact the supply or demand for the service

This type of analysis will give decision makers an idea of the cost effectiveness of the asset in question relative to the desired goals. Fiscal impact analysis can help answer several other key questions:

Is the current production process for a municipal service cost effective long-term (this requires including both operating costs and the associated capital equipment?)

Can the government afford to maintain and eventually replace the capital assets? Our cities are full of underused and abandoned capital projects because of poor planning or a misguided belief that the investment responded to a long-term need. Entertainment and sporting venues are prime examples.

Can the city achieve its vision and performance goals with the approach being proposed? Just because the city has always provided a given service does not mean that the old way is still cost effective or effective at all. There are many public, private and hybrid methods for delivering a given service.

Finally, what are the costs of deferred maintenance? How much deferred maintenance can the asset survive, and for how long before its functioning is compromised? For example, Road quality degrades in a nonlinear fashion. There is a gradual decrease in road performance for several years, then, in a very short time, a road will rapidly decay. Cities should understand the consequences of not maintaining their assets.

A fiscal impact model can help decision makers understand the answers to these questions. Such an analysis documents the full lifetime costs of a capital asset or an entire class of assets. These costs can be compared to the overall municipal tax base. Most communities will enjoy many years of near-maintenance-free benefits from their new capital investments. Eventually, they will face the choice of either maintaining those assets or letting them degrade. Failing to maintain an expected level of service reduces the desirability of the community. The response from the private sector may be a swift loss of confidence in the local government. This can start a downward spiral that the community may not recover from. It is too easy for families and businesses to vote with their feet. Building a fiscal impact process into capital budgeting is very cost-effective insurance against this unhappy outcome.