ABSTRACT
All budgets disclose how revenue is to be raised, in what anticipated amounts, and for what purposes it will be spent. All budgets permit budget makers to set fiscal priorities among competing uses of scarce public resources. In this sense, then, all budgets are policy vehicles; yet differences in governments’ programmatic responsibilities, along with the laws under which they operate, either accentuate or limit the extent to which budgets can be used to shape public policy. For example, state governors are better positioned than city mayors to use the budget as an agenda-setting instrument, especially where state law allows substantive legislation to be enacted as part of the budget. Thus governors in those twenty-seven states can include both the statutory and appropriations authority for new programs in the budget bill itself, and then be able to apply the item veto (possessed by governors in forty-four states) to any changes made by the legislature to either. Moreover, the expansive policy reach of the states, grounded in the Tenth Amendment’s reserve powers clause, allows governors to use the budget to influence outcomes across a broad range of public policy. Mayors, in contrast, face a budget constructed largely on the services that municipal employees provide to city residents. With upwards of four-fifths of city budgets devoted to salaries and fringe benefits of government workers, and with spending flexibility walled off by myriad special purpose funds, mayors have far less flexibility than governors to carry out major programmatic re-prioritization. Mayors also find themselves with less revenue-raising flexibility than governors possess. As legal creatures of the state, cities can employ only those revenue sources authorized by state law, leaving them heavily dependent on the property tax. In addition, mayors cannot use municipal budgets to create or change local ordinances (comparable to statutory law at the state level); that must be done through separate legislation.
