The county’s fiscal year begins on the first day of July and ends on the thirtieth day of June but the budget process is a year-round continual process. The Budget Office prepares and submits instructions for development of the next fiscal year’s department proposed budgets shortly after the beginning of the current fiscal year. Budget meetings are conducted throughout the county each fall to garner input from the public during the administration’s preparation of the budget. County departments review program priorities and submit their proposed program budgets to the mayor.

The Budget Office is responsible for reviewing, analyzing, coordinating all departmental budgetary requests and presenting these requests to the mayor for final decisions. By charter, the mayor’s budget proposal must be submitted to the County Council on or before the twenty-fifth day of March. As been done in each year for the last two decades, the mayor is currently hosting community budget meetings in each of the major county districts to gather information and requests from the public regarding the FY 2020 budget.

Several constituents have questioned why the mayor is holding these meetings when he will be vacating the office at the end of this year.

The mayor will end his term at noon on Jan. 2, 2019. He and his appointees could take it easy these last months of the term, but that is not what’s best for the community. Instead, we continue to work hard making the best of these last few months to ensure county projects and initiatives remain on track as well as ensuring a smooth transition into the next administration.

The new administration will not have months of preparation when it enters office on Jan. 2, 2019. So my office is making sure that requests from the department personnel and the citizens that participate in these community budget meetings is available for the new mayor and his or her administration to review. The new administration will have three very short months to develop and prepare an almost $1 billion operating and capital budget for submission to the Maui County Council by the March 25th deadline. Scheduling community budget meetings and incorporating requests received at these community meetings into the budget would be nearly impossible.

By laying the foundation for the FY 2020 budget based off the suggestions and requests collected from community budget meetings, we will provide a head start for the incoming mayor to build the budget into what he or she envisions for Maui County. The information garnered from these meetings also assists the grant managers in the county departments in providing recommendations to the mayor and council on what nonprofit services should be funded. Federal programs that the county manages such as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) also require us to gather input from the community to help prioritize their annual action plan.

The fundamental purpose of the county’s budget is to link what we want to accomplish for the community with the resources necessary to do so. The budget process does this by setting goals and objectives, establishing reasonable timeframes and organizational responsibility for achieving them, and allocating resources for programs and projects. To this end, the budget serves four roles:

• Policy Document. Sets forth goals and objectives to be accomplished and the fundamental fiscal principles upon which the budget is prepared.

• Fiscal Plan. Identifies and appropriates the resources necessary to accomplish objectives and deliver services and ensures that the county’s fiscal health is maintained.

• Operational Plan. Describes the organizational units and activities of the county. The county is made up of departments and departments’ subunits are called divisions. The budget describes each department and division, including a mission, description of services, goals/objectives, performance measures.

• Communications Tool. Provides the public with a blueprint of how public resources are being used and how these allocations were made.

We will be holding three more community budget meetings in this series. There will be a meeting at 5:30 p.m. today at the Kihei Community Center; a 4 p.m. meeting Oct. 11 on Lanai at Hale Kupuna O Lanai; and a 4 p.m. meeting Oct. 18 on Molokai at the Mitchell Pauole Complex. Please join us and share your comments with us. For more information, please call me at 270-7855.

* Sandy Baz is budget director for the County of Maui.