Support Material for Budgeting

PAF 9140

• Supporting Material
• Restricted Access

Extended advice for Selecting Project

Assignment:Select a budget project from the Community Board Register or elsewhere (such as your work) for the Cost Estimate and Budget Justification Projects, which are Assignments A-5 and A-8. Do not start these two assignments until instructed! However, before you get to Assignment A-5 you need to have the project firmly in mind.

Budget register @http://www.nyc.gov/html/omb/downloads/pdf/cbrboro6_15.pdf. You can also use any earlier (or later) budget register. The point of this device is to provide hints for your project, it is not to provide you a complete cost estimate or budget justification.For more sources at New York City Office of Management and budget, search for budget registers here.

Avoid projects that are too poorly defined or too simple to constitute acourse project.

The first step with your course project is to perform a cost estimate.

• Further instructions will be provided during the session labeled "Cost Estimate" (typically session 4). The cost estimate is explained in Module 13 of Budget Tools 2e.
• The cost estimate is due before the budget justification begins.
• The cost estimate should be for three years beginning with the Budget Year and labeled for the ending calendar year.
• For this assignment, we will arbitrarily assume fall semester proposals meet a November 1 deadline for the mayor's/governor's budget request; spring semester proposals are looking to the next November for inclusion in the mayor's budget.
• The fiscal year begins the next July 1 and ends June 30 the year following and is labeled for the year in which the June 30 occurs. (If you choose an alternate government to submit your budget to, you should correctly identify the fiscal year and provide information about it as a footnote in your cost estimate).
• For example, if you prepare a budget proposal any time in 2016, it is for inclusion in the mayor's January/March 2017 budget proposals for the FY 2018 fiscal year.
• The two additional years are FY 2019 and FY 2020
• You will also write a budget justification (Budget Tools Chapter 7 Budget Tools 2e Module 14) for this project (that is Assignment A-7). You will have instructions for the budget justification assignment later.
• The cost estimate is not a budget justification and should not contain information explaining why the program is good to have. It should solely focus on demonstrating costs.
• The project you select should lead to outcomes associated witha broad public objective.

More on the Cost Estimate and Budget Justification:

1. Your proposal should be about DOING SOMETHING, generally this means creating a new program or extending an existing program.
2. If the program can be evaluated on the basis of profit or net positive revenue (even if that isn't what you propose), it isn't permissible.
3. Avoid programs that can be fully funded by their own savings (you may need internal approval, but often these do not need legislative approval).
4. The focus of your program should be what the organization you "represent" does. Thus, creating a grant program for someone else to do something is not a good fit, neither is a program that outsources almost all actual work leaving little more than a contract manager to the program you propose.
5. Your project should be substantial. As a thumbnail guide for substantial, aim for $250,000 each year.
6. Projects that are designed around evaluating possible programs (pilot projects or large scale evaluations) are a poor fit and should be avoided. The objective is to propose an expansion of government or nonprofit activity.
7. The objective is to propose anewprogram or program element.
8. The basic difference between a capital project and an expense project is that anexpense projectDOES SOMETHING, whereas acapital projectACQUIRES SOMETHING. This distinction is impure because you cannot do something without acquiring materials and supplies and you don't acquire something without the intent of doing something with it. But, the focus of doing and acquiring should be generally clear.
9. Your project should be for anexpense project, not acapital project.

• Simply increasing capacity (adding staff to an existing activity without any change in the activity) is not a sufficient proposal.
• If you propose doing something and a small part of doing something requires acquiring something (for example, running a day care activity which requires acquiring space), that is acceptable.
• Simply acquiring something (building a building, bridge, road, etc.) is not acceptable.
• Most long lasting things that you might want to acquire can be RENTED, so you may want to consider this option to avoid any capital component to your project.

If you select a project for which the term "service units" is not a good fit (such as a change in a management unit that primarily serves an organization director), you will likely not be able to meet some of the cost estimate and budget justification expectations. Consequently, you should avoid such projects.

More on Selecting your Project:

(1) The point is to develop a program or program element. If you stray far from this, you will have substantial trouble with some elements of the assignment. For example, very large well funded program evaluations may fit the time frame of the estimate, but they are not programs or program elements and do not have well defined beneficiaries, so they will be difficult to develop within the framework of the budget justification as required.

(2) If you have substantial expenditure in the building trades and you are not engaged specifically in maintenance, I will likely consider your project to be a capital project, which is not allowed.

(3) Public or nonprofit enterprises that operate like for profit businesses and should be excluded. Entities that evaluate projects on return on equity (ROI) are inappropriate for this assignment.