City of Ukiah, Calif., uses OpenGov to publish first fully digital budget in California

UKIAH, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The City of Ukiah, Calif., the first city in California to publish a fully digital budget, was presented with an Innovation Award at this year's California State Municipal Finance Officers conference for its work using OpenGov's interactive budget book to publish the fully digital budget.

"We are proud to partner with the City of Ukiah, and look forward to our continued work together to increase transparency and build community trust and engagement," said OpenGov Vice President Mike Mattson. "Our software has allowed the City to streamline the budgeting process, align budgets to performance outcomes, build trust with constituents and modernize reporting capabilities." 

Since implementing OpenGov's Budgeting and Planning software, Ukiah has saved 600 hours and $87,000 on building the annual budget.

Increasing community engagement
While a traditional budget document is exhaustive, residents and elected officials must typically wade through hundreds of pages of complex data to find what they need. Using OpenGov's budgeting software, community members can now access the budget through a user-friendly online format, where they can view the budget broken down by funds and departments, and even change views using different report and chart styles.

"I have really enjoyed the opportunity to reach out to our community and provide them with information they did not have access to before," said Daphine Harris, Financial Services Manager, City of Ukiah. "Being transparent helps us build trust with our community and increases engagement. Residents no longer have to attend a council meeting to access our budget information. They can view it prior to a council meeting and then decide if they would like to attend the meeting to ask further questions or, if they prefer, view the information online."

Saving time, energy and resources in budget development and review
"We were able to reduce time spent building the budget by about 600 hours since implementing the new system," said Harris. "Three years ago the budget I worked on was just over 1,000 pages; we were able to reduce it to about 500 pages, and now we have gone completely paperless with an online budget."

OpenGov's user-friendly interface not only allows for more than 50 staff members across the City to build their budgets quickly and effectively, but it also ties together multiple departments' budget tracking in one system. Due to the more streamlined process, the City's cost to produce the budget decreased significantly from $200,000 to about $113,000.  Those funds will be reinvested in focusing on more detailed data analysis and daily work that often gets set aside during budget season.

The software also allows City staff and council members to focus more of their time on budget strategy, rather than gathering and understanding budget reports.

"Since the city council spends less time gathering data, council meetings are now shorter and council members can spend more time on strategic decision-making," said Harris. "It was a great decision for the City. You have to rise up and pursue that vision when you can."

About the City of Ukiah
Named California's best small town, and the sixth best in the entire country, Ukiah is a unique community of 16,000, rich with character, arts, vineyards and natural surroundings.  Located along the busy Highway 101 corridor, just two hours north of San Francisco, it is the Mendocino County seat and the business,education, and shopping center for a three-county area.

About OpenGov
OpenGov is the leader in providing the public sector with modern cloud-based software solutions to help power more effective and accountable government. Over 1,000 public agencies across the U.S. rely on OpenGov to help allocate resources, increase efficiency, improve public engagement and make data and information readily available to staff and the public.

SOURCE OpenGov