User Friendly Budgeting Case Study

The purpose for conducting the survey is to collect information on the correlation, if any, between User-Friendly Budget documents and citizen participation in and understanding of local municipal budgeting. More specifically, the data collected will focus on how User-Friendly Budgets have or have not benefited local municipalities. The data to be collected will reveal whether the New Jersey Local Finance board’s requirement for local municipalities to create a User-Friendly Budget document has increased citizen engagement in the budget process. The survey data that will provide answers to questions such as: “Are more citizens attending budget hearings and or participating in the budget process since the new requirement?” and “Is the new requirement, helping municipalities focus their efforts on creating programs and spending money in effective ways?” and “Have local residents gained any additional benefits from or knowledge of the budgeting process?” The survey will also permit one to conclude whether the new requirement is a complete waste of time, not increasing citizen engagement and only creating more paperwork for local municipal officials, such as chief financial officers.

By posting on or linking to a local municipal website, the survey respondents may not actually live in the target municipality and thus the responses may not be fact-based. Direct distribution of the surveys to citizens who are or who have participated in the budgeting process entirely avoids this negative draw back and insures that the survey respondents for a local municipality are actually citizens living in the municipality. Additionally this will increase the chance of citizen participation rate in the survey, as people are more likely to participate if they are being directly asked to complete the survey versus having to download off a municipality