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This week, Chuck is joined by Shayne Kavanagh, senior manager of research for the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA). The GFOA provides training and resources to city finance officers. In his role, Kavanagh develops new approaches to budgeting, financial reporting and revenue that can better address the problems local governments are trying to solve.

Chuck and Kavanagh discuss the role of finance officers as “decision architects.” Kavanagh gives a closer look at the world of local government finance and shares some tactics that finance officers can use to improve their processes.

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  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey, everybody this Chuck Marohn with strong towns. Welcome back to the strong towns podcast. Shayne Kavanagh is the Senior Manager of research at GFOA. GFOA is the government finance, officers, association, and he joins me today. I think from Chicago. Is that right? Shane, you're in Chicago today, that's correct. Chuck Hey, welcome to the strong islands podcast. Nice to talk

  Shayne Kavanagh 0:31

  to you. My pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me on. I've been wanting to

  Chuck Marohn 0:35

  have this chat for a while, so I'm glad we can do it. I think maybe the first thing to do is to just talk about what the GFO A is. I think a lot of people, you know, I mean, we understand that cities have budgets, and there's got to be people who put those together, but there's this whole kind of infrastructure under the hood, and I guess I'd like to explore that maybe first, before we get into any of the like Nuance policy stuff. So what's the, what's the GFO a what's, what's the role of that organization? Sure. So

  Shayne Kavanagh 1:07

  GFOA stands for the Government Finance Officers Association. We've been around since 1906 and we are the professional association for local and state finance officials. So the way I typically explain this is the CFO of the town you're in is very likely a member either of the national GFOA, of which I am an employee, or the State Chapter of GFOA. So we have about 25,000 members now, and we do various educational programming and other activities to promote thriving communities through the lens of public finance training.

  Chuck Marohn 1:44

  I know you have a conference. You bring people together in terms of, like, the stuff that people would get into if I'm a mayor, I'm a city council member, I'm looking at a budget. I I go to my city's website. You guys are essentially an organization of the kind of people who put that stuff together is that kind of, maybe the way that absolutely, that's

  Shayne Kavanagh 2:05

  definitely a fair way to describe it some I guess we'll call again, something people that are often quite familiar with. GIF was our budget and financial reporting awards. So these are awards for the presentation of the budget and or the financial report that elected officials often are familiar with. So back when I was an assistant city manager and a gf way member, our elected officials were quite interested in those awards to see that we got them every year. So that would be an example of something that I think elected officials and members of the public might often come into contact with from GF way. But more broadly to your point, Chuck, is our members are the folks that are putting together the budgets, doing the financial management analysis, doing financial reporting, and all those things you would associate with the finance function of law.

  Chuck Marohn 2:51

  So how is this different than, say, the Government Accounting Standards Board or some group like that, and maybe talk a little bit about those Gatsby and the whole like kind of framework and how your organization relates to the stuff that they do,

  Shayne Kavanagh 3:09

  sure. So Gatsby is a body that sets standards for government accounting. So maybe I know your group talks quite a bit about different standards, so I'm sure some of your members are familiar with different Gatsby pronouncements that announcements that require things in the financial report and or the annual financial report, I should say. And we are a membership association, so we do not have any, like, quasi regulatory powers like that. So we don't set like hard and like rules or whatnot that local governments who need to follow in their batch reporting or budgeting. Our work is strictly what I call soft law, which means that we don't have any legal you know, we'll call it power behind what we're doing whatsoever. Ours is purely voluntary, right? And folks participate in the award programs I mentioned earlier because it's a good thing to do. They want to show that they're following professional best practices and things of those nature.

  Chuck Marohn 4:04

  You are the Senior Manager of research. So what, what kind of research are? I want to get into a couple of the things that I know, but just generally, like, I feel you've settled it a little short here, because you're like, hey, we do professional awards. And I'm like, Yeah, you do professional awards, but you're also doing, like, really meaningful work, advising people on how to look at their budget and consider their budget. Can you talk a little bit about the research aspect of that? Yeah,

  Shayne Kavanagh 4:30

  absolutely. So yeah, I do the R and D work for GFOA, and our R and D work nowadays falls into different categories that I will broadly label rethinking projects. So the idea of behind rethinking is, is the name imply taking a second look at how public finance is concep