ABSTRACT
Fiscal Policy Planning Fiscal policy planning generates information to improve the decisional basis for local officials. Fiscal policy planning is a systematic way of responding to a changing policy environment by allowing small town managers and town planners to strategically integrate the community’s financial revenue resources into the community’s effort to promote a rational public improvement investment (Bland and Clarke, 1999; Bland and Rubin 2002, Ch.7; Mattson, 2002, Ch.9; Chapman, 2010, 1987; Kriz and Wang, 2013). It’s a mechanism to integrate the comprehensive planning process into the community’s overall financial management system. Fiscal policy planning encompasses at least three local governmental planning tasks: (1) the ability to devise an appropriate public budgeting process, (2) the capacity to undertake capital facilities and debt management policy planning, and (3) the ability to establish financial policy practices to manage the cost of municipal service delivery (Mattson, 1991, 2002, pp. 140-55; Lee, et al., 2013, pp. 451-64). Moreover, fiscal policy planning helps maintain the required linkages between a city’s comprehensive plan and its municipal budget by assisting in efforts to ensure rational budgetary allocations intended to ensure proper payments of public capital facilities and the delivery of needed municipal services (O’toole and Stipak, 1991; Mattson, 2002, Ch.9). In this chapter, we explore the functional role of debt finance within the fiscal policy planning process.
