I hope everyone is sitting down when I say this and has their blood pressure cuff at the ready. I read the proposed changes to BP 16 Budget, 5 Year Plan and Financial Reporting and liked most all of what I saw! In my opinion it is a vast improvement over the budgeting "process" we currently kind of follow sometimes. Without getting into the weeds, here are some top-level observations: The FB&A, LRP and Clubs Committees are much more involved in the budgeting process! The process is much more specific than what RCSC did in the past! The process exhibits a management/committee partnership process and attempts to limit behind the scenes board member meddling! (Some meddling is still permitted) There is implied transparency in the reporting of project requests, projects in process and their status! There appears to be a genuine effort to apply objective criteria (yet to be determined) in the project approval process and require documentation of project justification! The process is still flexible enough to allow for mid-course corrections! I am gloating a bit because I was the SOB that demanded something like this be done. Is it perfect, heck no. Is it a vast improvement on what RCSC did in the past, heck yes! Will it be followed? We shall see.
This to me is something I've been critical of for a long time, and that's allowing a single Director to simply make a motion to spend X amount of dollars on a PIF project! At least now, whether it's a Club seeking those dollars or a pet project from the Board, it has to go thru the process of filling out that proposed 7 page form. It's my understanding that if the request comes from a Club, the Form first gets sent to the Clubs Committee where it will be either passed back seeking additional information or, if accepted, passed forward to the Long Range Planning Committee and eventually onto the Finance& Budget Committee? Long gone will be a simple motion, by one Director, dedicating PIF money to project that nobody knows how much it will actually cost or the time frame when it could be implemented, all of which bypasses the Finance and Budget process!
I too would cringe when Steve would move to allocate millions of dollars to some project he supported (indoor dog facility). That is just a terrible way to do business.
