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Cumberland County staff lay out shift to program-based budgeting and four-quadrant model
Summary
County staff presented a program-budgeting framework that maps services into four quadrants (mandated to discretionary) and showed department-level allocations and positions; managers said software will be needed to scale the approach and provide mandated-vs.-nonmandated granularity.
County staff on May 4 told the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners they are moving from a line-item budget to a program-based approach that groups services by mandate and strategic priority, then assigns revenue, expenses and positions to each program.
Assistant County Manager and Chief Budget Officer Deborah Shaw said staff began the program-budgeting work in October and asked departments to classify requests as tier 1 (mandated), tier 2 (grant-offsettable) or tier 3 (discretionary). "Program budgeting as defined by the Government Finance Officers Association is a method of budgeting that organizes the budget around programs rather than line items," Shaw said, noting the county completed much of the work manually.
Shaw and budget staff described four quadrants used to classify programs: quadrant A (clear federal/state mandate and no cost control), quadrant B (mandate with potential for cost control), quadrant C (supports regulatory compliance) and quadrant D (board priority/discretionary services with full cost control). Denise Urban, the staff member who compiled department program lists, walked commissioners through examples and totals.
Urban said quadrant A programs include the medical examiner and the North Carolina youth detention program, both shown with expense allocations and no positions attached; she noted the medical examiner allocation for FY27 is $450,000 with no defined revenue source. Using animal services as an example, staff showed how enforcement and shelter programs were split across quadrants with revenue from permits, grants and contracts offsetting some costs.
Commissioners pressed staff on whether the county could distinguish baseline, statute-required service levels from services provided "over and above" the mandate. Shaw said that without an enterprise budgeting module the work is manual and difficult to scale: "We do not have the system," she said, and recommended adopting a Tyler Munis program-budgeting module when the county migrates its finance system to the cloud.
Shaw and other staff committed to provide further detail, including (a) the statutory citations departments used to justify mandated services, (b) a vacancy report and (c) a list of programs that began as one-time pilots and are now ongoing. The county manager and budget team said the program-budgeting spreadsheet will be shared in the county's shared drive and refined before the manager's formal proposed budget is delivered to the board.
Next steps: staff will correct manual-calculation errors flagged by commissioners, provide requested supporting documentation and return with more detailed service-level and revenue breakdowns once the data are reconciled or a software module is in place.
