This episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast explores how public sector leaders are rethinking budgeting to create more transparent, data-driven, and community-focused financial strategies. Recorded live at Tyler Connect, the conversation features Chris Fabian from Tyler, Liz Steward from Envisio, and Nick Mastronardi from Polco. Together, they share how priority-based budgeting, performance management, and resident engagement can help governments align resources with strategic goals and build lasting public trust. Tune in for a compelling look at the future of budgeting in the public sector.
In this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast, we examine what it really means to modernize public sector budgeting in today’s fast-changing world. Recorded live at the Tyler Connect conference in San Antonio, this conversation brings together three thought leaders helping governments drive more transparent, agile, and priority-based financial planning.
Chris Fabian, senior director of product strategy for priority based budgeting at Tyler; Liz Steward, vice president of marketing and research at Envisio; and Nick Mastronardi, CEO of Polco, discuss the Government Finance Officers Association’s (GFOA) Rethinking Budgeting Initiative. Together, they explore how governments can align resources with community priorities, track impact through performance data, and close the feedback loop with meaningful resident engagement.
With real-world examples throughout the conversation, this episode spotlights how budgeting innovation is already taking shape — and how collaboration between technology providers and public finance leaders is driving meaningful progress.
Tune in to discover how priority-based budgeting, strategic planning, and data-informed decision-making are shaping a more resilient and trusted public sector.
This episode also features a spotlight on City Hall Selfie Day — a nationwide celebration of civic pride and local government heroes hosted by ELGL. Learn how to get involved on August 12 and show your support for public service in a creative and memorable way.
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Chris Fabian: The challenge that we face today is that there’s an incredible amount of change. There’s changing priorities, levels of trust in government, there’s changing financial conditions, and we need a resource allocation mechanism that responds to that appropriately to get resources where they need to be as fast as we possibly can. So, Rethinking Budgeting calls for that.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast, where we explore the trends, technologies, and people shaping the public sector. I’m your host, Josh Henderson. Thanks for joining us.
In this episode, I’m joined by Chris Fabian from Tyler, Liz Steward from Envisio, and Nick Mastronardi from Polco, for a conversation about what it means to rethink public sector budgeting. We recorded this episode at our annual Tyler Connect conference in San Antonio, and it’s a great discussion for anyone looking to bring more transparency, accountability, and impact to the budgeting process. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Alright. Welcome to the Tyler Tech Podcast. Today’s episode explores a big and timely question. What does modern budgeting look like in the public sector? And at the forefront of this is the Rethinking Budgeting Initiative, and we’re joined by three leaders who are helping public sector organizations bring it to life.
Chris Fabian, senior director of product strategy for priority based budgeting at Tyler, Nick Mastronardi, CEO at Polco, and Liz Steward, VP of marketing and research at Envisio. Chris let’s start with you. Why has traditional budgeting become such a challenge for governments today, and why is now the right time to rethink budgeting?
Chris Fabian: It’s a great question. And traditional budgeting, incremental budgeting, and line item budgeting has actually been in practice for a very long time. 100 years, I heard, was the celebration during the pandemic. So, line item budgeting has been tried and true. Why?
It’s not hard to do. It’s incremental. It doesn’t challenge the status quo.
And for an environment where there’s not a whole lot of change, it’s the right kind of approach to keep local government steady. The challenge that we face today is that there’s an incredible amount of change. There’s changing priorities, levels of trust in government, there’s changing financial conditions, and we need a resource allocation mechanism that responds to that appropriately to get resources where they need to be as fast as we possibly can. So, Rethinking Budgeting calls for that.
It calls for nimbleness. It calls for data. It calls for a feedback mechanism complete with residents in our community and their sentiment, as well as performance measures to prove whether or not the programs we’re investing in actually work. And ultimately, it calls for priority-based budgeting to synthesize how all the pieces work together and give us confidence in the budget that we’re adopting.
Josh Henderson: Now for listeners who may may be new to this, can you explain the key principles of priority-based budgeting and how they fit within the broader Rethinking Budgeting framework?
Chris Fabian: The key to priority-based budgeting is the priorities fundamentally.
So, what are the outcomes that we want for the community that we serve?
We need a program inventory to understand what it is that we actually do. What are the programs and services we deliver and program price tags? What do they actually cost? From priority-based budgeting, we come to a first measurement of alignment. Are the resources in our budget actually aligned with the priorities that we’re attempting to deliver?
And ultimately, and probably most importantly, is a call to reallocate, to find those areas that most local governments don’t believe they have – for readily available resources – where we can divest ourselves of lower priority programs, find partnerships, find efficiencies, find alternative revenue strategies to free up vast amounts of resources, ten percent of our entire budgets in some communities. Collier County recognized yesterday Florida for a Tyler Excellence Award for freeing up $37,000,000 from their budget to find resources we don’t think we have in order to adequately invest in the priorities that need funding.
Josh Henderson: That’s really great. And now priority-based budgeting is clearly very powerful, but it’s only as effective as the follow through. So, Liz, let’s turn it to you. How does Envisio help organizations connect budgets to strategic goals and ensure that spending translates into those results that you want to see?
Liz Steward: Sure. Thanks, Josh. So Envisio is a strategy and performance management platform. So, our role within the modernized budgeting process is to really help answer that question of how are my budget funds actually impacting community outcomes.
So, what does that look like? Well, if you think about priority-based budgeting as a way to effectively reallocate resources to fund strategic priorities, then what we do at Envisio is to help take those strategic priorities and those funding allocations and tie them to a strategic plan, tie them to the right people, to performance measures, to help us ultimately share results. And so, if you think about it as a bit of a workflow, what we do is we align the right people to do the work. So, is it projects?
Is it a plan? Is it programs? Is it performance measures? And then we ask these people to capture their progress over time, so narrative updates as well as performance measures updates.
And once we have that in place, then that’s the way transparency and visibility can come into play. So, we can produce reports for councils, elected officials, for staff. And then critically, we can turn those reports and make them community facing so residents can understand where the budget is going to actually impact results.
Josh Henderson: That’s great. And, obviously, public trust and transparency are essential in that regard. But, Nick, what role does public engagement play in making priority-based budgeting even more impactful, and how does Polco help governments bring residents into this conversation?
Nick Mastronardi: Happy to answer it. First, just got to say I’m excited to be here with a couple longtime friends. We’ve all been working on this, like, really mission oriented field for a long time. We’ve been there, before Rethinking Budgeting was really a thing that brought all these elements together. Chris was always working priority-based budgeting. We’ve been really passionate about engagement and that, and when done well, generates some key data that should be key KPIs and then making sure that goes into a strategic plan that Envisio tracks. So, we’ve all just been bumping into each other in like a favorable way and now for it to really kind of be coalescing like this is really exciting.
I do think just a little background. I worked for a while in the White House on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. Should have been a dream job. When we’re there, everything we did at the federal level really cared about driving real GDP per economic growth.
But now let’s talk about our local governments, even our state governments. What is their key metric that they drive on? And it kind of falls apart.
It’s not really real GDP or unemployment in your community necessarily. A lot of times it’s your residents’ quality of life and satisfaction with public services. And that’s even open, like, is it all residents’ overall satisfaction? Or do we have a problem with older adult satisfaction with parks?
We need to understand how a resident’s quality of life is and not just at a high level, but the different demographic partitions, satisfaction with the different service delivery areas.
And so, in order to get to that, to gather that data requires quality engagement. We do all kinds of engagement, probably our best is our national community survey, but that’s where we really get to. We combine that with almost every other bit of data that’s out there and it’s called the GPAL database. And we look at where you are, your time trends, where you’re going up, where you’re going down, your crosstabs by demographics, your benchmark comparisons, and we say, here’s all your data, we’ve mapped the landscape, put that into a strategic plan however you’d like. You’ve got your friends here at Envisio, they’re going to help you prioritize and track those outcomes.
We got your friends here who are going to translate that into your budget and your resource allocations, and it doesn’t end there. Now we’re going to come back and let’s see if we made progress on those outcomes. And if you did or if you didn’t, you need to close the loop with your constituent stakeholders because that’s what ends up giving you trust in your community, satisfaction, appreciation, understanding, because a day will come when you may need to go back to them if something happened in your community or there’s a new initiative or you need a referendum. And if you hadn’t done it to that point, you may not be successful. But if you have done it with them at that point, then they’re going, I trust this group. I see what they’ve done with my dollars, with my input, and you’re set up for success in that case.
Josh Henderson: That’s really great. And now, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the principles of priority-based budgeting. Chris had mentioned the success that Collier County has seen with Priority Based Budgeting. But I want to get dive a little bit deeper into what, you know, real world success might look like in this case. So, can each of you maybe share a story of an example that illustrates the power of Rethinking Budgeting in action?
Nick Mastronardi: Are we going to pick the same one?
I’ll reverse the order to make sure I don’t my example doesn’t get stepped on.
But specifically, in in your last question, I mentioned the national community survey. We do other types of engagement, and I mentioned the GPAL database. We have other sources of data that come together. One of the ones I want to highlight is Lawrence, Kansas because I think they’ve just done such a phenomenal job bringing so many of these elements together.
Now they are doing quality surveys, but one of the things they’ve done for a long time is, we actually help communities ask for resident input during the budgeting process, not just before, during it like, hey, we have a draft budget. And they go out with a budget simulation, and does this seem to align with your input? So, it’s even, like, at that stage really good. One of the other best practices that we’ve seen is issuing taxpayer receipts, like little receipts.
It’s just another way to close the loop, but I think Lawrence, Kansas has just been an excellent community in following GFOA’s Rethinking Budgeting principles and doing engagement and data at every single step of that annual process.
Liz Steward: Yeah. I think I’ll jump in there as well.
Like, I agree with the Lawrence, Kansas example, Nick.
I think they’re a fabulous community, and they’re doing amazing work in this area. Josh, you mentioned that Rethinking Budgeting encapsulates a set of principles, and one of those key principles is transparency. We know transparency leads to greater trust, and it’s so critical. So obviously, Rethinking Budgeting, it’s about finding those opportunities to expose the budgeting process, the decisions that are made in that process, and the outcome of those decisions.
So, I think a really great example of that is the city of Ontario in California. So, a couple of years ago, they were able to pass a sales tax rise of one percent with no sunset clause, and they were able to do that because they made a promise to their community that they were going to be transparent in how they spent that money. And so, fast forward a couple of years later, and they’re just now launching a community dashboard where they are showing exactly that. So, this is the money that we’ve raised, and here is how we’re spending it aligned with programs, projects, some key priorities that we promised that we were going to spend it on, and here are the metrics, and here are the outcomes of that spend.
So, they do an amazing job of the data storytelling piece of this, so not just passive transparency, but, like, very actively communicating with their residents what they’re doing with the funds allotted to them.
And I was going to draw attention, these are awesome stories, to a group of local governments who are known as the Rethinking Budgeting trailblazers.
And this is a group that has banded together from the public sector. So, these are practitioners and leaders in their communities, Liberty Lake, Washington, Fort Worth, Texas, Denver, Colorado public library, Bloomington, Minnesota. There’s a handful of others in this group. And together, specifically with GFOA, we have public sector, we have industry association, a professional credibility and the private sector with Envisio, Polco, and Tyler in a one of a kind type of collaboration to bring Rethinking Budgeting to the masses. And it has several elements to it. One is highlighting success stories from these communities, just like you’ve heard from Lawrence, Kansas and Ontario, California.
These are practiced organizations who have brought priority-based budgeting, resident engagement and performance management to life.
They are presenting some of them here at this conference at Connect – Liberty Lake tomorrow, Mark McEvoy. They’re participating and writing articles from government finance review, GFR, ICMA’s Public Management Magazine, and even Governing Magazine to help inspire more organizations to see what they’ve done and realize that it’s replicable, it’s achievable, it’s scalable.
And so, taking these examples from Lawrence, Ontario, Liberty Lake, Fort Worth, we have a groundswell to be able to take and package and inspire the next group of organizations that Rethinking Budgeting is attainable for them.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Jade Champion: Hey, podcast listeners. City Hall Selfie Day is coming up fast.
Josh Henderson: Mark your calendars for Tuesday, August 12, and celebrate this nationwide spotlight on local government.
It’s all thanks to engaging local government leaders -- better known as ELGL – celebrating public service, civic pride, and the everyday heroes who help make our communities
Jade Champion: And at Tyler Technologies, we’re all about supporting public service. So, we’re jumping in to help spread the word and the selfies.
Josh Henderson: It’s simple. Snap a photo in front of your city hall or any government building. Be bold, be creative, be proud, then post it with the #CityHallSelfie.
Jade Champion: We can’t wait to see how you show your local government pride.
Josh Henderson: It’s their tenth year, so make it count. Need ideas? Check the show notes for links to inspiration and head to elgl.org/cityhallselfie for all the details.
Jade Champion: On August 12, get those cameras out, and let’s celebrate local government together one selfie at a time.
Josh Henderson: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
We talk about these success stories. We work in the public sector at Tyler. Adopting new budgeting models isn’t always the easiest thing. There are often challenges involved in that, especially for smaller governments. So, what advice would you offer to local governments that are interested in this approach?
Nick Mastronardi: I would say I was a professor for a long time. I used to teach some econometrics classes, or it was like applied data science, and everybody’s apprehensive to just get started. But you really don’t learn it and improve until you just get started. And I think all of our tools; we’ve just been so mission oriented and passionate about this that we’ve have we’ve learned how to help you get started almost regardless of where you are ready to plug in.
So just, you know, reach out to us, Polco, Envisio, Priority Based Budgeting here at Tyler.
Chronologically, if I were going to suggest one, like, I mean, this kind of annual cycle works really well when you hear from your stakeholders, your constituents. So, I think doing a resident survey upfront helps a city staff align with their council to figure out what their priorities are. And that has nice cascading downstream effects to make sure you translate that into your strategic plans. So chronologically, think that’s a great place to get started.
But wherever you’re comfortable, this is coming. We’re trying to make it easy for it. Like, data, your residents are going to be demanding these things. Like, just get started somewhere.
I’m biased, but I like doing the survey as a chronological starting point.
Liz Steward: Yeah. We are all Rethinking Budgeting nerds. So, any of these companies can reach out to us, and we can help find a place to start. The other great place that I’d recommend starting with is the Rethinking Budgeting Readiness Assessment by GFOA.
So, the three of our companies, Tyler, Envisio, and Polco, have been collaborating with GFOA for a couple of years to build this tool, which helps local governments analyze their own budget process as it stands today across ten different dimensions of the budget. And it’s not about external certification or judgment on how they’re doing in the budget. It’s really for each community to get together and bring cross-departmental representation and talk about the budget process as it stands and identify key focus areas to exactly find that next step, as you were saying. So, again, we have all facilitated this readiness assessment, so any of our three companies can help set that up, but it is a great place to start.
Chris Fabian: And I was going to mention the assessment as well. Thanks, Liz. We’ve seen facilitated sessions. We’ve seen organizations just take the readiness assessment questions and distribute them to their staff to bring people into the conversation together in their organization to realize that this is something they all know that they need, but here’s this tool, a simple questionnaire to help surface these realizations.
And last but not least, one thing that we’ve been doing in the priority-based budgeting realm for organizations who are just starting to think this through and they’re wanting to know, yes, I want those achievements of Collier County, Florida or Ontario or Lawrence, but can I get a little bit of a sneak peek with the power of AI?
And we’re doing this particularly for Tyler ERP organizations, but it does not have to be limited to that.
We are reading in ingesting general ledger data to produce back for organizations what we call a first draft, what might be called a digital twin of the organization. Here’s what we would anticipate, the programs you offer, the costs of those programs, your alignment with your strategic plan and specific budget solutions and recommendations that you are in store for. And that’s the power of the technology and some of the AI capabilities that exist today.
So, on all of these fronts, numerous ways for those who are interested to start to make their way.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. And now one of the exciting aspects of this work is how Tyler, Polco, and Aviso are working together to offer governments an integrated solution. I can tell I’m here with you. I can tell there’s enthusiasm among the three of you. Why is this partnership important to you, and what possibilities does it create for public sector leaders, would you say?
Liz Steward: I think this is the only partnership out there that is really providing an end to end technology stack to help create transparent, agile outcomes focused budgets. It is a unique partnership. We are all experts in our own areas, as you can probably tell.
We’re all mission aligned companies. We all work exclusively with the public sector, and we’ve all been involved in Rethinking Budgeting for a number of years now. So, we are deeply connected with the work. We’re all very passionate about it, and we bring deep expertise to local governments who want to do this work.
Nick Mastronardi: I’ll just say one thing that’s kind of cool about is it’s pretty organic. Like, it just we’ve been natural, as I mentioned, doing these things together. Obviously, now with Chris at Tyler, is facilitating kind of, you know, a more rapid kind of coalescing of them. And I think the other thing too is really excited that GFOA has made this a strong priority last year and so much of their work going forward.
And so, it’s just the time is right. It’s it kind of feels to me like a moral imperative. I mean, I’ve worked in academia.
I’ve been in public sector, private sector, and the time is now right for the public sector, this laboratory of democracy begins to learn from each other. The data’s we’re able to handle the data, learn and make sure that each the tax dollars are going towards their new priorities. It’s just the timing is right. The organizations are recognizing it.
It’s giving it some tailwinds, and it’s just a noble pursuit. So pretty cool.
Josh Henderson: I’m going to leave you with one last question.
It’s a bit of a loaded question, but I’m hoping each of you can touch on this one.
As more communities embrace Rethinking Budgeting, what’s next for them? What do you see as the future of public budgeting and public engagement from your perspectives?
Chris Fabian: When we organized the Rethinking Budgeting trailblazers, this is actually one of the questions that we ask ourselves and we focus on.
The realization that while today, identifying your programs, putting a program price tag on them, aligning with priorities and optimizing resources along with performance measurement and management and resident engagement, it feels like the frontier. This is how we’re progressing to get all organizations to rethink budgeting. We aspire to a time when Rethinking Budgeting is the norm that everybody has rethought their budget. And so, what comes next? Rethinking Rethinking Budgeting.
Think that is exactly where we are on that frontier. You look at continued improvement of trust. You look at the way that the public sector and the private sector can actually collaborate in new models overall. You think about budgeting in local governments.
What about all of the resources regionally that we see in nonprofits, you see in academia, that you see in the private sector who actually share common goals with our local governments? They want a better economy, they want safer communities, they want smarter cities. And I am particularly passionate about regional resource alignment and how that comes into play. I think it’s an area ripe for improvement and innovation.
And I think our work together will lead naturally there.
So, we’re that’s at least one area that we’re anticipating.
Nick Mastronardi: You guys are going to tell me like I’m crazy, but I really think that we’re on the verge of a public sector renaissance. Like, I’m not trying to imply that where we’ve been has been the dark ages, but it has been pretty data dark. We keep track of things, but are those what is the ROI for those dollars in terms of the objectives of the community? I think it’s been pretty opaque in some sense.
One other example. I worked at Amazon for a little while. We were rabid about using data.
And not only that, but engagement across the company from marketing to sales. We always try to represent customer, and that helped the organization make clear execution progress on their goals. And very efficiently, the company grew to over a trillion dollars, like enterprise value. So, what is the equivalent of that for the public sector?
That doesn’t need budgets need to go crazy, but the efficiency and the quality of life of their residents. And I think it’s been hard to do really big, bold, truly innovative things without data because your taxpayer, your constituents could go, what? That’s unfounded. Why are you doing that?
But if you have reason to believe that this is a demonstrated objective and the ROI is there, think data is going to empower governments to do innovative things, we’re going to see increases in quality of life per dollar spent now with the data to support them even though they haven’t necessarily been done that way before. I think it’s going to be really exciting.
Liz Steward: Yeah. I’m going to echo Nick and Chris on this. I think the first piece in my answer of what’s next is taking this groundswell that Chris described and taking it out to the masses. So, let’s make this the norm.
I think that’s what we all hope and expect to come next. And I think that we have the opportunity now because GFOA is leading the charge. We have the technology and the tools to do it. We’ve got a passionate community of trailblazers that want to lead the way.
And then, Nick, that you stole my thunder. I was going to talk about the data renaissance as well. So, I’ve worked in performance management companies for over twelve years. Using data is hard.
Trusting your data is hard. And I think we are really starting to see a step change in that now with local governments really starting to understand the power of their data. Obviously, AI is driving so much change so quickly, but that is going to be absolutely key is to come out of the dark ages of data, as Nick would describe, and really become more data-driven in the way that we look at our communities. And, yeah, it’s a very exciting time.
Josh Henderson: This is a really great conversation. Thank you, Liz. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Chris, for joining me today on the Tyler Tech Podcast and for helping lead this transformation and for sharing how public sector organizations can rethink budgeting for a more transparent and impactful future. Thank you all so much.
As we heard today, rethinking public sector budgeting is more than just dollars and spreadsheets. It’s about aligning resources with what matters most, measuring impact, and building trust through transparency and engagement.
Chris, Liz, and Nick shared how priority-based budgeting, performance management, and resident input are coming together to create more strategic, responsive, and resilient governments, and why collaboration across the public sector is key to making it all work. If you’d like to explore more on this topic, be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources.
We’d also love your feedback. Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show so you never miss an episode. For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.