Rethinking Government Budgeting: A Path to Better Outcomes

Tyler Podcast Episode 150, Transcript

The Tyler Tech Podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Each episode highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give the podcast a listen today and subscribe.

Show Notes:

In this Tyler Tech Podcast episode, recorded live at Tyler Connect 2026 in Las Vegas, Chris Fabian (Tyler Technologies), Nick Mastronardi (Polco), and Liz Stewart (Envisio) explore how local governments are rethinking budgeting in a time of fiscal pressure, rising expectations, and rapid technological change. Drawing on insights from workshops and readiness assessments conducted with public sector organizations, the conversation highlights how leaders are moving beyond traditional budgeting processes toward more outcomes-driven, data-informed decision making.

At the center of this shift is a broader industry focus on rethinking budgeting, shaped in part through ongoing collaboration with the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA). Working together, these organizations have contributed to frameworks and tools that help governments better align resources with community priorities, incorporate data and resident input, and improve transparency. One example is the jointly developed readiness assessment, which enables organizations to benchmark their current budgeting practices, identify strengths and gaps, and establish a clearer path forward.

From practical frameworks like priority-based budgeting to emerging AI-enabled tools, the episode highlights how governments can reduce complexity, accelerate analysis, and spend more time focusing on strategic decisions rather than manual processes. The guests also emphasize the importance of starting with structure — using assessments to establish a baseline, build cross-departmental alignment, and prioritize where to take action first.

This episode also highlights City Hall Selfie Day, an annual initiative celebrating public service and civic pride. The campaign encourages local governments and community members to showcase the places and people behind public service, helping build awareness, engagement, and appreciation for the work happening across cities, counties, and agencies.

• Download: AI for Impact: Proven Results for Government
• Watch: How to Transform Budgeting Processes for Uncertain Times
• Watch: A Transformative Partnership for Priority-Based Budgeting
• Read: Tyler, Envisio, Polco: Transformative Budgeting Partnership
• Read: How Rethinking Budgeting Builds Trust, Agility, and Results
• Read: When Budget Pressure Forces Leaders to Change Tactics

Listen to other episodes of the podcast.

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Transcript:

Chris Fabian: I think organizations, people out there right now are faced with a lot of hype, and there’s all this potential. And there is real excitement. There’s fear as well, but there’s real enthusiasm about the opportunity at hand.

And in an era where there’s a lot of promises, there’s a lot of potential, what we yearn for is action.

Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Henderson.

Today’s episode explores how local governments are rethinking budgeting in a time of tight resources, rising expectations, and accelerating technology change, and how data, engagement, and AI are helping organizations move from traditional budgeting approaches to more outcomes driven decision making. And my guests today are Chris Fabian, senior director of product strategy for ERP budgeting at Tyler, Nick Mastronardi, CEO at Polco, and Liz Stewart, VP of marketing and research at Envisio. Together, they’ve been working closely with public sector agencies through workshops and assessments that are uncovering how organizations are aligning resources, measuring impact, and engaging communities in the budgeting process.

In this conversation recorded live at Tyler Connect 2026 in Las Vegas, we’ll hear insights from those sessions, including the common challenges organizations are facing, where they’re making the most progress, and how structured tools like readiness assessments are helping leaders move from insight to action with greater clarity and confidence.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s dive right in.

Welcome back to the podcast. It’s so great to have you all back here. Let’s begin with the bigger picture. When you look across organizations today, what are some of the most common challenges or gaps in how budgeting is being approached?

Nick Mastronardi: I’ll jump in here. We had a workshop yesterday with a bunch of, different cities, counties, school districts, And, you know, resources are tight for a lot of people, and they’re trying to do really good work, especially in today’s challenging time.

And the one thing that emerged to me was, hey, they want to start to get even more outcomes from the great tools that they have. They feel like they’re not fully penetrated on the tools that they have, and they want to get further. But they know that requires some training.

And, hey, that’s what they’re here for at Tyler Connect. But I think one of the amazing, and it might be counterintuitive, is that sometimes a small additional layer of tech, such as AI, could actually make things more intuitive and easier for them to get to the level that they want. So, I just thought it was a really interesting conversation that was emerging yesterday with these communities who want to get the most that they can get, which is either training and/or combined with a new AI layer to make it easier and more intuitive for them during this time.

Chris Fabian: I want to pick up on something you said, Nick, which is just the economic challenges that most communities are facing seems to be, a common theme in terms of just organizations finding themselves in this repeated pattern of a binary where they’re looking at the options, they’re working fast. And on the one hand, it’s service level cuts and across the board reductions, and the other throwing some version of a hail mary pass for a tax increase at a time when maybe trust in in government is at the highest that it’s ever been, overall. And so, this this hunger for other options besides just taxes and cuts, is there something else that we can discover? That tends to be a great common ground that we’re seeing right now.

Liz Steward: And I’d add one more thing to that as well.

A common theme that we’re seeing that came out yesterday as well in the workshop is tying the budget to outcomes. So really getting that transparency, and it’s not just on the budget process and how those decisions are made, but what are going to be the outcomes of these investments.

So, it’s all they’re all interconnected, these pieces, but it’s really how do we use our limited budget dollars to be more effective and to actually have an impact that’s aligned with our community values, that’s aligned with our strategic priorities that everybody understands, that we can tell a story around. So, there’s another big challenge that communities are facing is just how do we really expose that budget process, the decisions, and then the outcomes that come from it.

Nick Mastronardi: That’s been a perennial challenge, and it’s one of the most important things. It’s just for a community to know what their desired outcomes are and track those well. And then to Chris’s point, I think last year, we were just talking about, like, we were starting to see the inklings of the strained fiscal environment and the increasing debt issuance.

I remember us talking about on this podcast. And now it certainly did. It ended up last year was one of the record years of debt issuance, and 2026 is now, as per as we discussed last year, on track. And so, you want trust.

You want it a community needs to know what their outcomes are, be tracking progress to those outcomes, be sharing that with their constituent stakeholders. That’s what builds trust, and that’s what sets you up for success.

Josh Henderson: I think that’s some great context setting. Sounds like there were some really great takeaways too from yesterday’s session. So, that’s really great to hear.

Within some of those patterns and those themes that, you know, you picked up off of or you knew ahead of time before this assessment took place, where do you see organizations tending to be strongest, and where do you see them most often sort of struggling, or where are the challenges? Where do those lie? How can you speak to that?

Chris Fabian: We’re working with one of the largest local governments in the country right now. I was out there a couple weeks ago, and they’re well on their way. They’ve implemented priority-based budgeting in a $40,000,000,000 budget within about a six month period of time, and it’s been really phenomenal. But one of the reflections that they had was this wasn’t the first time that they were thinking about this evolution or this practice of getting outcomes, getting programs, measuring resource alignment, and trying to drive decisions with data.

This wasn’t an epiphany moment like last year. This was something that they had been thinking about for probably over a decade. But where they struggled was just having that moment of where the stars are aligned and they can commit to a direction, have a framework, have an organized path, have the technology. They reflected on just what felt like the daunting nature of this work just five years ago has now dissipated so much and given them the confidence and clarity to move forward.

So just seeing that where there is a hunger, there is a common vision. GFOA has been talking about this for many years with rethinking budgeting but now having perhaps the technology to ease that process in to allow them to do something they wanted to do for some time.

Nick Mastronard: I mean, it’s daunting, but they see you show up with your big smile and your positive attitude.

I’m sure that assuages their fears.

Liz Steward: I would 100% agree with Chris. I think there’s a much greater recognition now that budgeting processes need to change. So, we’ve been working on this for a few years now. We’ve been collaborating with GFOA around rethinking budgeting for a number of years, so it’s great to see that understanding change. If I step back a little bit as the researcher here and just talk broadly about the assessment, because we’ve facilitated a number of these workshops. We’ve done a lot of these assessments with individual leadership teams at different cities, counties, school districts.

The common themes that we see, in terms of where our organization’s feeling strong, what are their bright spots, we are typically seeing those around where they around people and culture, which is great. We’re seeing a really good movement, mindset shift, to Chris’s point, towards wanting to support innovation, towards empowering the budget staff, dedicating the appropriate human capital to that. So, those tend to be the bright spots that we see.

In terms of where organizations tend to put their focus, where they want to improve, some of the things you’ve already spoken about. So, an outcomes-focused budget, being led by performance measures, not just setting those at the beginning of the budget process but using them to inform the budget process next year. The other common area that we’ll see, which I’m sure Nick can talk to, is around engaging residents in the budget process that often comes up as a focus area. And then finally, alignment with strategic priorities. So, allocating resources in line with the goals of the organization, in line with the community values. So those are the areas that come up again and again as the most common struggles for organizations that go through the assessment process.

Nick Mastronardi: I think that’s really well said, Liz. Just to take a step back because I know we’re immersed in it and comfortable with it and spoke about it last year, but last year and the least last couple of years have been a seminal year with GFOA issuing their rethinking budgeting guidance, and now this year issuing the new distinguished budgeting award criteria to put some teeth behind the recommendations.

And kind of like the two main elements are that are, hey, communities during budgeting use data and use stakeholder input – or the voice of the resident or your constituents in it. And so we go through, and just to double down on what Liz was talking about, we have this assessment co-developed with GFOA, so community just doesn’t have to I think this is a bright spot or maybe this isn’t a bright spot and I don’t know, But you can actually take this assessment about your budgeting process, see where your strengths, your weaknesses, your benchmarks are, and know where to focus and prioritize, which is this meta layer thing that happens before you begin to focus and prioritize and actually allocating the budget to help your community’s needs.

So, it’s just a great tool with GFOA. We had literally, you know, a dozen communities do it yesterday. I think we’re up to between 200 to 300 communities who have now done it and have the benchmarks and the insights, and we’re happy to share. So, if there’s one call to action from this, I think in your community listening and wanting to do amazing things, let us know.

Come take the rethinking budgeting assessment, and we’ll help guide you through the results. Separate point from the assessment, and this is more anecdotally. Everything Liz touched upon are the highlights that we’ve seen from the assessment.

But just anecdotally from yesterday, I feel like there are a lot – and I’m not trying to be, like, ageist or anything – but I feel like there’s a lot of millennial, Gen X folks who feel they have the most important resources. They have the will, and they they’re eager to not just do things how things have been done before, but how things seem the right way to do it. And they, I think, poke and try and bring elements of this up. But if they don’t have strong clear buy in all the way up through their electees, as they try, they’ll get slapped on their hands, and then they’ll step back and wait for those folks to retire.

And so, it’s either wait, constraints clear, the barriers clear, and then those communities are the ones who then come in and work with us and do it and have great results and then say, why the heck didn’t I do this earlier?

Or if that’s not happening fast enough, let us know and do something as simple as the assessment because it shows – relative to the other communities who’ve done it and don’t have those friction points – that you’re a standard deviation, you know, different from the mean on this thing. So, I think I was prompted on something on engagement, but I kind of wove that in. And I do think if you do quality and if you do engagement well and work it in, the other barrier to implementing these things are you can hear from people in the community that say, hey, I have this pet project or whatever. But if you have really gathered input systematically in this way, you can stay on your strategic plan and make progress on your goals instead of getting this whiplash back and forth.

But that’s all in that’s all part of the assessment as well. Engagement is a clear part of rethinking budgeting and consequently the assessment.

Chris Fabian: I’m reflecting of another string that we see out there is at least a sense of urgency. Boy, sense of urgency is one way to put it, recognition that this system of resource allocation simply has to change, and it’s breaking for some communities under the pressure of such daunting fiscal distress.

But we’ve seen it even in prosperous communities where an elected official or a new county manager comes into office and they know the budget process – back to a weakness. They know how to go through the month by month department submit their budget, and then there’s review, and then you work your way towards adoption. So, we know the process itself and the workflow, but to actually rethink, are we putting the resources where they need to be? Are we thoughtfully considering how we’re going to balance this budget? Finding that common ground from leadership that this is really a moment that’s significantly important. We have to make substantial changes. The old methods just won’t carry the day.

Liz Steward: And if I could just follow-up with something Chris said there, that finding the common ground amongst leadership, that is one of the huge pieces of value you get from taking the readiness assessment with your leadership team.

So, a big part of this budgeting transformation journey is collaboration. So, it’s not just the budget office, the finance office that are responsible for taking this journey, but it’s the leadership team at a city or county. And so, when we facilitate these assessments for an individual organization, we ask for participation from the city manager’s office, from communications, from strategy performance and innovation teams, or community engagement because that collaboration is so critical to getting buy in, getting consensus. And we have seen so many times and moment for the budget office or the finance director when they hear from these other departments on these different dimensions of the budgeting process. So, I just wanted to double down on what Nick was saying about the value of the assessment. When it’s done at that level, it can really help to get you started along this journey with consensus, with collaboration.

Josh Henderson: I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into that, this idea. It sounds like that there needs to be some structure in play. Like, where you’re offering structure when it comes to the assessment. But can you speak a little bit more about the importance of organizations kind of doing the assessment, kind of understanding the structure as opposed to just kind of haphazardly jumping into a solution? Why must organizations do that?

Nick Mastronardi: I mean, the first thing I’d say is it’s just really easy to do the assessment. So instead of just jumping in, like, take ten minutes, take a week. I mean the assessment’s short. You circulate it with your key department heads, staff, anybody, and that’s part of the budgeting process.

And you just can’t I mean, literally, it’s just, you know, a dozen questions, and then you get really insightful outcomes. I mean, I think it’d be great to follow it over time, pre, post your tools just to then even reveal that. But even if it’s your first time, then getting those benchmarks. Like, we’re talking, I think I mentioned 200 to 300 cities who now have done this assessment.

So, it’s just a really easy thing to do. It’s really insightful. And we have a and it’s easy to fall into this feeling that you’re insular and everything that you do is unique. But really, there there’s a lot of other communities going through the same budgeting process and having that comparison will really inform and guide your journey.

Chris Fabian: And wouldn’t you say before you start anything where you were hoping to make some sort of transformation, even if your intuition is guiding you, you want a baseline. It’s like stepping on the scale before you commit to a workout plan. I know I bought the membership. I know it’s my New Year’s resolution. I want the six pack abs, but I want to I want a baseline for where to start so I can work through the process and be able to come back to it and say, we have something measurable. It’s quantitative. We went through it together and look at the progress.

Liz Steward: Because the genesis of the readiness assessment was less about actually understanding readiness and more about finding a place to start for organizations. Any kind of transformative work like this, it takes time. You need a starting point.

And you really can start anywhere, but it depends on the unique structure of the organization, the culture, the unique needs of the community. And that’s why the readiness assessment came to life, was really to give organizations that ability to go, we’re agreed. We’re going to start here. I think the one other piece I’d add to it is that having the different lenses on the budget from the different departments is also incredibly valuable.

So, we’ve had city attorneys turn up for these assessments. We’ve had elected officials. We’ve had heads of fire and police. And having those different lenses and those different voices in the room, taking the time and the space to hear from them makes a really big difference in making that decision of these are actually our focus areas.

Here’s where we want to go with this. Here’s where we want to start on this journey.

Nick Mastronardi: Let let’s make it super simple. If you’re a city, county, school district, budget finance officer out there, if you’re committing to doing priority-based budgeting or not, if you’re just doing your old traditional incremental budgeting process regardless, find one of us. I mean, we can help you, Polco, Tyler, and Envisio. Just reach out to one of us.

Take the assessment. It’s fast. We’ll show you your strengths, show you your weaknesses, and then help you getting started in the right place for you.

Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.

Jade Champion: Hey, podcast listeners. City Hall Selfie Day is right around the corner.

Josh Henderson: Mark your calendars for Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and join us in celebrating public service, civic pride, and the everyday heroes who keep our communities running.

Jade Champion: Here at Tyler, we’re joining in on the fun, spreading the word, and the selfies.

Josh Henderson: It’s simple. Snap a photo in front of your city hall or any government building, get creative, and post it with hashtag city hall selfie.

Jade Champion: City Hall Selfie Day is for everyone, town, city, county, library, special district, or even remote workers. So many ways to get involved and support your local government.

Josh Henderson: August 11, grab your camera, snap a selfie, and let’s celebrate local government together.

Jade Champion: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.

Josh Henderson: Let’s dive into that a little bit more, this this idea of getting started. So once an organization takes the assessment, once they see where things are better allocated and things like that, once you see how it, you know, is cross-departmental in terms of the efficiencies gained, and so on and so forth, What does it look like to move from insight to action? So how can you speak to the first practical steps or the early practical steps that are being taken after the assessment?

Nick Mastronardi: That’s what our workshop did yesterday is we broke the group out into what emerged as their weaknesses, and we did the strengths too. So, it would it’s very divergent. Some of the communities’ weaknesses were actually, I think one of the strongest ones was getting alignment with electees, but there were some communities who struggled with getting all the department heads on the same page. There were some communities who really struggled with accessing data.

There were some communities who really struggled with getting constituent transparency and buy-in from their constituent stakeholders. So that pops right out of the assessment. And then yesterday, because we had the luxury of doing it in person, they those groups could actually chat, and they said it, you know, it’s almost like a therapy session as the other people in there. But, I mean, those are just examples of what emerged and they can start to tackle, but you probably have more.

Liz Steward: I love this question. We have a saying at Envisio, which is think big, start small, make progress. One thing we’ve learned through this process is that you can start anywhere in this process.

So, if you decide that you come out of the assessment or your organization decides that you want to embark on a priority-based budgeting process, you can do that without having a formalized strategic plan in place. You can. You can have an effective PBB (priority-based budgeting) process without it, Or you could start working with Envisio and get your plans and projects online, get transparency into your processes, start that work to change the culture in your organization for accountability and ownership without having a program space budget yet, or you could start getting your community sentiment in place with Polco without having the other pieces in place yet. It all matters. It’s all interconnected, and you don’t have to do it all at once.

I think one of the beautiful things about this partnership between these three companies is that we’re all good at meeting organizations where they’re at and bringing along the other pieces at the point that they’re appropriate. So, we all work very closely together. We collaborate. So, you can really start anywhere with any one of our organizations, and it’s all a legitimate valid place to start, and you’ll see impact quickly.

Chris Fabian: I think, just to add on to that. I like the phrase within Envisio. I think organizations, people out there right now are faced with a lot of hype, and there’s all this potential. And there is real excitement. There’s fear as well, but there’s real enthusiasm about the opportunity at hand.

And in an era where there’s a lot of promises, there’s a lot of potential, but what we yearn for is action. The assessment in and of itself, it tends to leap towards action. It’s pointing us where we can go, where we can be aligned. In priority-based budgeting, we see this all the time that it’s one thing to have the data.

Great. I now understand my program structure and our costs and our alignment or lack thereof. They go through the insights process itself, which, to your question surfaces so many opportunities backed by case study examples where they can make tremendous change, but it’s one thing to have this potential energy and we need to convert it into something that is actually meaningful and we can prove to our residents. One of last year’s Tyler Excellence Award winners was Collier County, Florida.

And just to see them go from $150,000,000 of savings and revenue opportunities in Insights, which sounds great, but is actually empty unless you follow through and do something to earlier this year having made their way through their first $50,000,000 of recognized receipts, savings in the bank account, that’s tremendous. And I think the more that we can leverage action, take those first steps, start small, make progress, and then go big, it’s going to serve us very well for the types of challenges we need to solve.

Nick Mastronardi: This is probably a a good point to just briefly mention, wanting to meet communities where they are and start small with action. We’ve actually been working on a new version of the PBB joint offering called PBB Lite. It’s just a very easy AI-native way to get started. It’s not the full heavy thing, but it’s just a way for you to get a taste and see how it works. So, interest in that, just let any of us know too.

Josh Henderson: It’s a really interesting approach because it feels like you all are learning kind of on the fly, right, with these assessments. You’re seeing new challenges. You’re seeing, you know, new folks who are having issues with their budgeting, and you can help them out in those ways. You can also pull data from that yourselves to kind of shape the assessment a little bit further.

Nick Mastronardi: I think it’s that. I mean, I think it’s learning from the I mean, we worked hard with GFOA to build a great assessment. And, yeah, now it’s time to learn from it, which is great. I would just say the other thing that’s changing how we operate is we AI is changing so fast.

AI has kind of existed in some of the work that we do with our performance analytics and data gathering in the back ends of our products for decades. But now the language model in particular, it can help you find the right thing, synthesize it into a report. And so, we have to bring that into our combined product suites to help customers hold their hands to get the most outcome.

So, it’s our learnings that are driving our continued innovation, but it’s also leveraging the emergent tech technologies around us too.

Josh Henderson: Just kind of wrapping things up here. Looking ahead, how do you see budgeting continuing to evolve as expectations around transparency, accountability, and sort of community engagement start to grow, evolve, things like that?

Chris Fabian: I’d love to jump in. So just last week, there was an article in Governing Magazine. One of our, you know, partners in crime, if you will, in this journey is a gentleman named Andrew Kleine. He used to be the budget director of, the city of Baltimore, and he put together a great article on program inventory, program costing, calculating the cost of a program. And it picked up a lot of traction, and I was texting with Andrew to say, you know, what’s old is new again. The program costing when we got into the work, you know, was ten, 15 years in the making, and we weren’t even the first. Program budgeting has been around for quite some time.

And among the comments on a LinkedIn post, a city manager who we also know very well and work with together had commented, Andrew and Chris, you you’ve been at this for many years, and the industry is now moving – with GFOA and ICMA – towards this direction.

But at the same time, it has to be easier. It has to be faster. And this is the direction that we’re going. You spend so much time on the process of developing this great data, but we need more time on executing and implementing solutions.

And Andrew responded in the in the thread with, hey, city manager, don’t worry. We have this process nailed down. And he proceeded to submit a 99-page how-to guide to calculate the cost of a single trash collection program.

And we laughed, and we said, you know, this is this is exactly what the market what the community of implementers believes is that this feels like a ton of work. Well, that’s old news. That is the way that it was probably five years ago, is that you’re going to slog it through. As Nick mentioned, we were just talking about this yesterday, the velocity and the pace of change with today’s technology – and AI in particular – applied to the kind of data that that we have to bring to bear can dramatically accelerate the process of making your way through this analysis.

What that means for budgeting and the evolution of budgeting is we can spend, again, far less time cranking through the mechanics of data collection and far more time analyzing, discussing, deliberating, and arriving at more appropriate decisions.

I think that’s a huge upside to where we are with technology today.

Liz Steward: I think the other piece there, Josh, you mentioned transparency and where are we going with this.

It’s well documented that we’re in the middle of a trust crisis. I feel like I’m going to bring the bring the low energy here, but and I’ll end on a positive note. We do have a trust crisis at all levels of government, local, state, federal, and local governments are feeling that.

And so, as we continue to evolve the budgeting process and all this momentum that Nick and Chris have been talking about, I believe we’re increasingly going to see a need and a focus on being more transparent and to help build that trust and also for the budget officer to become a storyteller. So GFOA has a great piece about the budget officer becoming a decision architect, so helping to create that environment for better strategic decisions.

And I believe that we’re also going to see them becoming better storytellers. Like, how do we create trust in the budget – internally, with our elected officials, with our residents? I think we’re already seeing early signs of that. We certainly see that in Envisio and the types of work that we’re doing with communities to really expose some of these investments and show the community what they’re doing, what outcomes they’re leading to. And so that is my belief on the transparency side that there is going to be an increased focus on this, and it’s just so critical to the future of how we govern.

Nick Mastronardi: Man, awesome answers. As we answer this question about where things are going, I always like to keep my eye on the ball of what I think is, like, a critical power center of government operations, and that’s the yes, it’s decentralized, but it’s a constituent, citizen, resident, stakeholder.

And two big factors are influencing them today. One is the economy. It’s tight, yes, for governments, but also for residents. There’s a lot of inequality.

There’s just, people are having a tough time with housing supply, with rent burdened. I mean, it’s tough for a lot of people out there. So, the economy is giving them a little bit of pain. And at the same time, we’ve got these amazing innovations in communication technology, AI, and others.

Everybody’s connected through 1,000 different platforms and VMs. And so, you’ve got this real yes. It’s decentralized, but power source feeling pain and the ability to communicate and act.

That can really flare up. And I’m not trying to cast fear, but we just have to be conscious of that. And so, narratives can swirl.

So, to come back to Liz’s point, as the budget officer, you may feel like this is crazy, GFOA. Like, I’ve never done engagement. You know? I’ve used data a little bit, but not as much as I should.

And now, GFOA, you’re telling me to use data, but also as a budget finance to do engagement with my community? What are you doing to me? But it’s exactly because of that circulating malaise that’s out there that it needs to be done. And the way to do it is you take your budget as it exists now in these departmental breakdowns that don’t make sense, there’s no frame narrative.

You’re not going to coalesce everybody around this narrative and facilitate a great conversation. You really need to reorganize that budget to your program initiatives. You need to be able to demonstrate progress towards your outcomes and towards your objectives. And now everybody’s on the same page.

You frame the narrative exactly like Shayne Kavanagh from GFOA likes to say. And now you’ve tamed this potentially hostile environment. I don’t know if it’s hostile, but you should be prepared for it. It’s a chaotic environment.

And now you’re prepared to kind of tame it and succeed.

Chris Fabian: And good for GFOA actually infusing this value system into the distinguished budget award program and the very criteria. I know that is new, but they revised the criteria to incentivize all of us putting budgets together to go for these aspirations that can be challenging, but they’re so needed. And, again, we just applaud the efforts of GFOA for pushing the industry forward and commemorating, memorializing it within the standard of the distinguished budget award.

Nick Mastronardi: I think, again, big call to action is, like, figure out where you’re at. Come to us. We’ll help you with the assessment. Second thing though is, hey, pay attention because the distinguished budgeting award criteria have changed.

You’re going to want to comply with it. If you’ve been a winner and want to stay a winner, you haven’t been a winner and want to become a winner, and yes, we have tools to help you do that. We’ve used AI to try to make these tools really accessible, help you focus on the right ones. And I even think our AI tools together can actually help you write a great application for it too.

So, whether it’s just doing the assessment or you’re proven and you want to continue to stay proven with the distinguished budgeting award, let us know.

Josh Henderson: It’s great to see you all helping folks not feel too overwhelmed by all of this because I know it’s a lot to unpack. So always great to speak to you all, and great to see the, you know, the advancement and the evolution of the partnership, and can’t wait to speak to you next. Thanks for joining me.

Liz Steward/Nick Mastronardi/Chris Fabian: Thanks, Josh. Always a blast. Appreciate it.

Josh Henderson: As we heard today, the future of budgeting is about far more than balancing numbers. It’s about aligning resources to outcomes, strengthening transparency, and building trust through shared understanding and engagement.

From readiness assessments and priority based budgeting to performance management and community engagement, we heard how organizations are finding practical ways to cut through complexity and move from fragmented processes to more coordinated, data informed decision making. And importantly, how starting with structure even in small steps can help teams build alignment and momentum across leadership and departments.

If you’d like to learn more about the assessment or the solutions discussed in this episode, check out the show notes for additional resources. We’d also love to hear your feedback. Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com, and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show so you never miss an episode. For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson.

Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.