Bloomington fiscal committee presses for clearer program inventory, schedules follow-up on 2026 budget

Council Member Isabelle Smith, chair of the Special Fiscal Committee of the Bloomington Common Council, called the committee to order Aug. 21 and led a wide-ranging discussion about how the council should provide meaningful feedback on the 2026 budget as the city implements an outcomes- and priorities-based budgeting process.

The committee focused on three near-term issues: standardizing the program inventory that underpins the new budgeting approach, producing the data council members say they need to make spending decisions, and setting a schedule to deliberate before the statutory public hearing.

"The first step that we have to get right is the program inventory. And this is super tedious work," said Gretchen, the city controller, describing the need to allocate every dollar to a program in the new system. She told members the inventory will require the council and departments to decide how granular programs should be, and that some departments (for example, Parks) already work in larger program groupings while others record activity at a much finer level.

Committee members repeatedly returned to the same practical problem: the financial system the city uses, New World, tracks line items and divisions but does not automatically roll those…