Case Study 01 · Financial Leadership & Executive Communication

Redesigning Budget Development as Executive Decision Infrastructure

The City Manager selected me to lead and redesign the City of Gainesville's entire budget development process — from fiscal retreat through Commission workshops to adopted plan — building a structured communication system that connected strategy, operations, and resource decisions across 23 departments and a $467M budget navigating the most significant revenue disruption in the city's recent history.

Timeline FY2024–FY2026 — three consecutive budget cycles, with the full redesign built in year one

Role Redesign lead and principal author, Executive Chief of Staff to the City Manager

Capabilities Demonstrated Financial leadership, executive communication, process design, information architecture

The Challenge

A new budget office still building capacity. A 400-page deliverable. One year to get it right.

Budget development in a mid-size city is one of the most complex recurring deliverables in public management. It touches every department, every revenue source, every policy priority, and every public commitment the organization makes. When it works well, it gives elected officials, executive leadership, and the public a clear line of sight from strategy to services to dollars. When it doesn't, it becomes a compliance exercise — technically complete but functionally useless as a decision-making tool.

In Gainesville, the budget function had recently been reorganized into the newly established Office of Management & Budget — a unit the city's own adopted plan would later describe as still staffing up and still developing its internal processes. The existing workshop materials were data-heavy but lacked narrative structure: tables without context, numbers without a strategic through-line. The adopted budget book needed to evolve from a traditional finance document into something that actually helped multiple audiences understand how priorities, operations, and resources fit together.

As Executive Chief of Staff, the budget wasn't technically my function. But I saw a gap between the complexity of what the organization was navigating — including significant financial challenges — and the tools leadership had to make sense of it. I stepped in to redesign both the process and the product, building a system that could translate a $467 million, 23-department budget into something that actually helped people at every level of knowledge make better decisions.

The Approach

I didn't start with the budget book. I started with how budget information reached decision-makers.

The workshop system. I designed a structured presentation format for Commission budget workshops that replaced the prior approach — which was largely spreadsheet slides with minimal narrative framing. The new template gave every department a consistent structure: core services, strategic connection, multi-year budget trends with actuals and year-over-year change analysis, position levels, and a plain-language program and service impacts section that explained what the numbers meant for service delivery. Every workshop opened with a visual budget development timeline so the Commission always knew where they were in the process and what was ahead.

This format carried across the full budget cycle: a fiscal retreat in March to set strategic context and financial parameters, department-by-department workshops in May and June, an all-funds update in August, and two statutorily required public hearings in September. Each presentation built on the last. Supporting analytical memoranda provided detailed revenue modeling, fund balance analysis, and budget gap scenarios with explicit decision levers and dollar amounts — so the Commission wasn't just receiving information, they were evaluating tradeoffs.

The Adopted Plan

A Commissioner, a department head, and a resident walk into the same document. It has to work for all three.

I then carried the same design logic into the adopted Financial and Operating Plan — a 400+ page document that serves as the city's definitive record of its budget — with a caveat: designing for multiple audiences. A Commissioner needs strategic context and tradeoff framing. A department head needs to see their budget in relation to the whole. A resident picking up the adopted plan needs a way in that doesn't require a finance degree. The prior materials treated all of these audiences the same. I rebuilt the architecture from scratch so each audience could engage at their level:

The redesigned format earned the GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award in each of the three years it has been produced.

Neighbor's Guide

A linked entry point explaining how to navigate the document

Budget in Brief

Executive-level summaries for quick interpretation

Strategic Direction

Front-loaded before any financial detail

Economic Forecast

Cited sources with key takeaway callouts at each level

Budget Process Overview

Visual timeline with the full statutory and public-hearing sequence

Department Overviews

Mission, core services, strategic connection, budget trends, objectives, KPIs, and annual initiatives

Impact at a Glance

Three years of budget development, redesigned from the ground up.

3 Cycles FY2024 through FY2026, each iterating on the prior year

$467M FY2026 adopted budget across all funds

23 Departments presented through a consistent structured format

400+ Page adopted plan, principal-authored as Executive Chief of Staff

38 Consecutive GFOA Distinguished Budget Awards — last 3 under this format

7+ Presentations per cycle, from fiscal retreat through final adoption

What This Demonstrates

The leadership capabilities behind the outcome.

Financial leadership from outside the finance org chart

The budget wasn't my function. It was housed in a newly established office still building capacity. The City Manager brought me in as Executive Chief of Staff because the deliverable demanded someone who could integrate finance, operations, strategy, and communication — and drive it to completion. The City Manager's budget message credits me by name. The adopted plan's Budget Development Team is listed as me and one budget analyst.

Redesigning the process, not just the product

The budget book was the capstone, not the whole story. I restructured how budget information moved through the organization across the full cycle — from fiscal retreat to department workshops to public hearings to adopted plan. Each stage built on the last using a consistent framework, so leadership arrived at adoption having worked with the same structure for months. The prior approach was disconnected presentations with no narrative thread between them.

Information architecture built for multiple audiences

The same 400-page document had to serve people with fundamentally different needs and levels of financial literacy. I designed a layered architecture — from a plain-language Neighbor's Guide through executive summaries through full financial detail — so each reader could find their entry point without the document losing rigor for anyone else. The result was a budget book built to be used, not just published.

Building institutional tools that outlast a single cycle

A successful first year is a project. Three consecutive years — each refining the format, each earning a GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award — is an institutional standard. The templates and architecture I built became the organization's operating model for how the budget is developed, communicated, and adopted.

Redesigning Budget Development as Executive Decision Infrastructure

The work product, in full.

FY 2026 Budget Development Cycle

Three years of budget development, redesigned from the ground up.

The leadership capabilities behind the outcome.

This is what financial leadership looks like when it's built for decisions, not compliance.