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Home / Washington Business - Spring 2003 / The Story Behind POG |
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The Story Behind POG |
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Written On: Spring 2003 |
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With the state’s lawmakers facing a major budget deficit during a struggling economy, Gov. Locke unveiled the Priorities of Government (POG) in late 2002.
Peter Hutchinson, co-founder of Public Strategies Group in Minneapolis, Minn., and former Commissioner of Finance for the State of Minnesota, is one of the architects behind POG.
Hutchinson shared some of his insights with Washington Business Magazine:
“It’s an approach to budgeting. What distinguished it from most budgeting processes is that it starts with the revenue number known. Most budgeting processes I have been involved with start by asking people how much money they need.
“What POG is trying to do is start by saying that there is an acceptable amount of money that we are trying to spend. If you look at communities over time, there turns out to actually be a number that is pretty acceptable to people. If we can know that number in the beginning. What this suggests is that let’s start with what we know is the revenue, and figure out how to get the maximum results that we can for the revenue that is available. So you never ask people how much they want. You tell them how much there is and you challenge them to use their creative resources to figure out how to use the money available to create the results they want.
“And at the end of the process, you are not hacking slabs out of the budget and disappointing people. If people are going to get disappointed, they will be disappointed at the beginning, and they focus their attention on how to make what they have stretch as far as it can, as opposed to how to play the game to get more of what there isn’t.
“This came from my personal experience as Finance Commissioner of Minnesota, and it just got so tiresome to try to figure out what lies you were being told by people trying to scam the system to get money that I didn’t have and nobody else had, but somehow they imagined it must have existed somewhere.”
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