Twenty tips for covering budgets
1. Break out of the mindset that a budget is a dry collection of numbers that you report on a couple of times during the financial season. Remember that it is a document that charts your town’s plan for the coming year and reflects the political values of the people who put it together.
2. Approach the budget and town financial reporting as a cycle that unfolds during the year. As you do the event-driven stories, keep an eye open for possible enterprise stories.
3. Look at the bottom lines. If spending is greater than income, your town will run a deficit.
4. Look for stories you can do before the budget is released. For example, you can analyze the budgets from the past five or ten years and discover trends that are important to readers.
5. Put your budget-day stories into context by telling readers whether taxes will go up and by how much. Illustrate by showing what would happen to the tax bill of a “typical” property.
6. Make budget day stories meaningful for readers by telling them what services they’re going to be getting or losing. Find out who are the winners and losers.
7. Reduce clutter in your stories by taking some of your numbers out and putting them into graphics.
8. Get wish lists from department heads and check to see whether their priorities got into the budget. If not, what are the implications?
9. Pick one interesting or unusual part of the budget and write about it some time during the budget cycle. Tell readers something they didn’t know before.
10. Look at independent audits. These documents cast a cold eye on a town’s spending and show what really happened in a fiscal year. Look for deficits in all the funds — not just the general fund.
11. Check whether the budgeters are moving functions into enterprise funds. These funds are supposed to pay for themselves and cover government functions that you can measure. An example: providing water service.
12. Read the management letters in the audits. There’s where you will find criticism of the towns policies and practices.
13. Read credit reports and bond official statements from Bank of Uganda. The bond official statements will report, in gory detail, the financial condition of the town and possible risks to investors.
14. Learn how to use a spreadsheet and use it to analyze your budgets.
15. Get reports from the National Bureau of statistics and read them. They contain useful information about town finances and taxation.
16. If your town has big year-end surpluses, ask why. They may say it’s because they’re intentionally asking for money in the budget and not spending it.
17. Look to see if the town is setting aside money for legal fees and settlements. If that’s happening the town may be planning to close a lawsuit by settling with a plaintiff.
18. Find out whether municipal or city council contracts are set to expire. If the town is negotiating contracts, what effect will these contracts have on the budget (and vice-versa)?
19. Remember that the budget is a living document that has application year-round. Keep it on your desk and refer to it often.
Adapted from Writing Tips by Dave Herzog
