Taking the Pulse of Local Government Finance
In the summer of 2024, GFOA conducted a survey with the survey research firm Civic Pulse. The survey received 497 responses from local governments across the United States. Critically, the survey was not limited to GFOA members. Civic Pulse’s sampling methods do not use GFOA member databases. The survey was limited to municipalities and counties. Also, to keep the survey short and convenient for respondents to complete, we only addressed a limited number of topics (though future iterations of this survey could cover others). In this article, we’ll review:
- The respondents’ location, the size of their governments, and the educational attainment of the head of finance.
- Where the budget office resides within the organization.
- Governments’ time horizons for budgets, capital plans, long-term financial plans, and strategic plans.
- A comparison of what finance officers think their governments should be doing versus what they are doing.
- What concerns respondents most in their roles as leaders of the budget
- process.
- An analysis of how local governments involve the public in budgeting and the challenges they encounter in doing so.
- Finance officers’ self evaluation regarding key aspects of financial management.
- What we can learn from this study and where we’ll go from here.
Publication Date: August 2025
Authors: Shayne Kavanagh, Elaine Yi Lu, Zhuojun Lyu, and Nathan Lee
