By Robert Taylor
The City of Boerne has been awarded the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for the fiscal year 2023-2024 from the Government Finance Officers Association, reflecting a commitment to overall financial transparency and excellence.
The national award, secured through the hard work of the Finance Department, recognizes the City’s budget as one that excels as a policy document, financial plan, operations guide, and a communication tool.
The requirements and criteria of this award are rigorous. The City is just one of only 210 entities to receive the award for the year among state and local governments and school districts from the entire country.
“This is something our team is really proud of,” Finance Director Sarah Buckelew said. “We’ve worked very hard to build a budget document that pursues the City’s goals of providing financial stewardship through strategic, responsible, and conservative financial management.”
Staff begin work on each year’s budget in March and coordinate City Council workshops and leadership team meetings throughout the process to develop budget priorities driven by citizen feedback. The process culminates in the budget’s adoption by City Council in late September.
Great care is taken to provide the budget for review in an easy to access online platform where residents can learn about the budget development, revenue breakdowns, expenditures, and much more.
GFOA established the Distinguished Budget Presentation Awards Program in 1984 to encourage and assist state and local governments to prepare budget documents of the very highest quality that reflect both the guidelines established by the National Advisory Council on State and Local Budgeting and the GFOA’s best practices on budgeting and then to recognize individual governments that succeed in achieving that goal.
This award is the latest for the Finance Department, which was also recognized with the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting for the 36th straight year earlier in 2024. The team also recently won recognition for its Popular Annual Finance Report.
