How Pompano Beach, FL budgets to stay on track with strategic plan objectives

Pompano Beach faced the challenge of aligning its budget and strategic plan to ensure that progress was made toward the plan's goals.  

The City of Pompano Beach is located along Florida’s Atlantic coast in Broward County.

The City has been making strides to become more progressive and modern with a long-term vision for growth and opportunities.

The devil, as always, is in the details. While there was agreement on the strategic priorities outlined in the City's Strategic Plan, there wasn't always alignment between the budget and the Strategic Plan. The challenge was to create a budget that ensured that departments invested in, measured, and achieved the goals outlined in the Plan.

To bridge the gap between the Plan and the budget, Pompano Beach uses its budget process to drive the strategic priorities. Through training, communications, and performance dashboards (using OpenGov's Budgeting & Planning Suite) the budget team supports departments in their efforts to invest in, track, and measure performance against Plan objectives. Now, the City is on track to meet its goal of 75% alignment between budget requests and the Strategic Plan.

Using budgeting & planning software, Pompano Beach was able to track department investment and performance against strategic plan objectives. 

Prior to finding a solution, city departments linked budget enhancements to Strategic Plan goals to ensure that resources were invested in areas with the greatest return on investment and closest alignment with City Commission and departmental priorities.

This provided a balanced view of performance with respect to customer experience, department operations, personnel, and financial sustainability.

Once that framework was established, city staff were able to propose action items and funding levels, and then actively monitor performance using OpenGov. The city can now measure its strategic plan goals against department performance through dashboards with monitoring and reporting functionality. The budget team uses OpenGov to analyze year-over-year trends and “budget-to-actuals” for a given time period, as well as identify when minor course corrections are needed to avoid potentially derailing cuts in the future. When gaps are identified, the budget team is able to take necessary action.

Annually, the strategic performance manager works with key city departments to determine program goals and corresponding action items for the year, while aligning them with strategic plan objectives.

“The City Performance Program is currently in the process of identifying regular services, activities, and management processes that most effectively meet what Pompano Beach residents want from the City. OpenGov helps bring departments together and focus on what matters most,” said Ernesto Reyes, Strategic Performance Manager, City of Pompano Beach

To further keep on course in achieving the goals laid out in the strategic plan, the city has made itself more accountable to residents by sharing budget details and key metrics with the community on its Financial Transparency site. In this way, the city is upholding the Performance Program’s intention of improving public confidence in local government’s ability to be effective.

With ten departments currently collecting and reporting key data, the City of Pompano Beach is expanding adoption. Thirteen departments are in the process of creating balanced scorecards and completing their program goal worksheets. The budget team is working to link 75% of all budget requests to Strategic Plan Objectives and program goals, while also encouraging more departments to adopt best practices around budgeting and performance management.