Is Your City Heading for Financial Difficulty: A Guidebook for Small Cities and Other Government Units

摘要

The guidebook presents a set of techniques useful to a municipality in performing an analysis of its financial condition. The approach: (1) allows municipal officials to focus on trends within their city without calling for comparisons to externally developed standards or to conditions in other cities; (2) focuses attention on factors and trends over a relatively long period of time, thus allowing municipal officials to see whether possible problems are intensifying or improving; and (3) provides a framework for assembling and analyzing information about the city on a regular basis. Techniques presented are intended to provide an overview of the financial condition of the muncipality. The results obtained from using these techniques are a good beginning point for analysis, not a conclusion. Also, these techniques are simple to implement if the municipality follows reasonably good accounting and financial reporting procedures. Conditions contributing to municipal financial difficulty are described and discussed. Then a more detailed discussion of the key indicators or trends which are associated with each condition are presented. In addition, detailed procedures are presented which may be regularly followed to collect the data and to measure and analyze the trends associated with each condition.