From Phil Curtis, Chair, Warrant Committee
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Program Analysis / Structural Change
February 24, 2010

[As the Warrant Committee] discussed at some length last night (unfortunately not on tv as there were apparently more important media priorities), the Warrant Committee’s role is to analyze and understand the budget so that we can make a principled recommendation to Town Meeting. This year, for the first time, we are making a strong effort to understand the various budgets from a programmatic standpoint: what services/programs are provided by each department, what resources are devoted to each program, how well do we perform when measured against other communities or sensible metrics, and how important is the program to the central mission of the department. We believe that the better we can understand and explain the budget programmatically, the easier it will be for elected officials and Town Meeting to make the difficult political decisions that are involved in allocating scarce resources. We hope to have completed our programmatic analysis by the end of March.

In parallel with our budget analysis, we are also seeking ideas from all sources for structural changes in the way the Town and Schools conduct their business. We are in the process of collecting, classifying and organizing these ideas in the hope of launching a systematic and disciplined look at how we might deliver the same level of service more efficiently. Last week, we collected about 120 ideas from the Warrant Committee and Town and School managers. We also asked the Citizen Herald to post a request for suggestions on line and collect citizen responses for us. Tony Schinella has agreed to serve as the “shoebox” for citizen input, and he forwarded the first 20 or so responses to me yesterday. We are incorporating them into the mix and hope to have a useful spreadsheet in the next week or two.

Please feel free to share my comments about the Warrant Committee’s role if you find them useful.  Thanks for your efforts in bringing the budget to the people.

Best regards,

Phil Curtis