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Not the Kitchen Table: Why Local Government Budgeting Is No Household Matter

Each year during budget season, a familiar refrain surfaces: local officials are told to “tighten their belts” and “balance the budget—just like any household.” At town halls and budget hearings, this analogy often sets the tone. But for those who actually craft and manage public budgets, the comparison quickly breaks down. The process is far more complex, the constraints more rigid, and the stakes much higher than any kitchen-table conversation can capture.

“I wish it were that simple,” said Laura Larsen, budget director for the city of Baltimore. “But in local government you’re not negotiating with just one other person over shared goals. You’re navigating a process involving the mayor, 15 city council members, departments, residents, and labor unions—all with different values and priorities.”

“It’s like negotiating a budget with people who fundamentally disagree on whether to pay the mortgage,” quipped Andrew Kleine, a predecessor of Larsen’s as Baltimore budget director and former chief administrative officer for Montgomery County, Maryland, who’s now senior director for Government & Public Sector at EY-Parthenon.

Local governments do, of course, share some surface-level similarities with households: revenues should meet expenditures, debts must be paid, tradeoffs need to be made. But beyond that, the two diverge sharply—in scale, obligation, and purpose.

It’s a Much Bigger Table

“A household budget is about managing what’s best for your family,” said Uri Monson, Pennsylvania’s state budget secretary. “But public budgeting is about allocating resources for the benefit of a community—often people you’ll never meet. You might fund public transit you never ride or schools your kids don’t attend. That’s not personal budgeting. That’s collective responsibility.”

That responsibility plays out in complex ways.

Local budgets include a web of restricted funds, legal mandates, and external funding that all come with strings attached. Unlike a family deciding to forego eating out or holding off on buying a new car, a city can’t balance its budget by skipping a few “nonessentials.” Sanitation, emergency response and public health are anything but. Many services are required by law—and some needs, like shelter for unhoused residents or an unexpected influx of immigrants, spike without warning.

Debt Isn’t the Villain

Debt is another misunderstood area where the household metaphor misleads. In families, debt often signals distress—credit card overuse, unsustainable mortgages, looming bankruptcy. But in local government, debt can be a strategic tool.

“Governments borrow to invest in infrastructure—roads, buildings, water systems—that will serve residents for generations,” said Steve Hurm, former director of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. “A household might put off a renovation. But a growing county can’t just put up a fence and say ‘no more people allowed.’ We have to plan ahead.”

Debt isn’t a sign of failure. It’s often a sign of stewardship—spreading the cost of long-lived investments over the people who will actually benefit from them.

“We issue bonds; you have a mortgage,” said Kleine. “Both are fixed costs you have to repay. But one’s personal and the other’s public. If we made more of those comparisons explicit, maybe the public would better understand why cities spend the way they do.”

Managing Growth—and Risk

Indeed, one of the clearest differences between personal and public budgets is the time horizon. A family might budget a year or two ahead. A state, city or county must think in decades.

“In Baltimore, we’re living with the consequences of decades of underinvestment in capital repairs,” said Larsen. “We have a $2 billion deferred maintenance backlog. That’s the cost of short-term thinking.”

Growth only heightens the stakes. As populations increase, so do service demands—whether or not the revenues to support them have arrived. That’s why leaders like Megan Bourke, who is director of the Loudoun County, Virginia, Office of Management and Budget, are working with departments to define “minimum service levels.”

“We’re growing fast, but we know that won’t last forever,” Bourke explained. “We want to be ready for the day when revenue stabilizes and the cost-cutting conversations begin. It’s important to have structures in place so we’re not just slicing 10 percent across the board without understanding the consequences.” She points to fire engines as an example. “You need four people to run one. You can’t save money by running it with three. You either fund the service or you cut it entirely.”

Equity and Complexity

Public budgeting isn’t just about efficiency. It’s also about equity, and that introduces another layer of complexity.

“When you sit at the kitchen table to make budget decisions with your spouse, you’re usually working from shared values and similar life experiences,” said Larsen. “In city government, you’re budgeting for renters and homeowners, low-income families and high-income earners, people with cars and people who rely on buses. Every decision benefits someone and burdens someone else.”

Even routine choices, like where to cut park hours or how often to collect trash, can have vastly different impacts across neighborhoods. A missed sanitation pickup might be an inconvenience in one zip code and a health hazard in another.

As Kleine pointed out, “A city’s budget is about the commons—about the good of people across town whose lives you may never touch directly.” And as Larsen said, that means “the stakes are higher. And the accountability is broader.”

The Politics of Austerity

If the household analogy has political utility, it’s often as a pretext for austerity. “You rarely hear people invoke the kitchen table when they want to make a big investment,” said Larson. “It’s almost always about cuts.”

But cuts come at a cost.

“Austerity is often about shaving around the edges,” said Bourke. “But if you’re trying to significantly change the fiscal picture, you’re not tweaking—you’re cutting entire programs. And that has consequences.”

Worse, as Bourke noted, austerity can actually increase costs over time. Neglected maintenance, reduced staffing, and underfunded systems eventually create emergencies that cost more to fix than to prevent.

A Better Analogy

So if not a kitchen table, then what?

“It’s more like a citywide roundtable,” said Larsen. “You need people with different priorities to come together, wrestle with tradeoffs, and build a budget that’s not just balanced—but equitable, strategic, and forward-looking.”

Kleine suggested that while the household analogy isn’t inherently wrong, “we’ve done too little to make the comparisons actually useful. If we showed more clearly where the similarities stop and the complexity starts, we might have more productive conversations about what budgeting in government really requires.”

It requires fiscal discipline and political dexterity. Finance leaders bring expertise and a focus on process integrity, long-term financial health, reserve ratios, and compliance. Elected officials bring the values and political pressure of their constituencies. And the tensions between them aren’t flaws; they’re features of a democratic budgeting process. What follows isn’t just a checkbook balancing act—it’s an ongoing negotiation among vision, values, and fiscal constraints.

For elected officials, this means stepping into the budgeting process with an understanding that choices are rarely about simply “tightening the belt.” Budget decisions carry long-term consequences—both fiscal and social—and those consequences aren’t always obvious in the near term. Officials should ask not only “What can we cut?” but “What are we deferring, and at what future cost?” They also need to understand the legal mandates, service level thresholds, and operational realities that constrain or shape what’s truly on the table.

For budget directors and CFOs, the task is to do more than manage spreadsheets and present balanced numbers. They must serve as guides—translating financial data into context-rich scenarios that help policymakers see the downstream impacts of today’s decisions. That includes clearly outlining minimum viable service levels, showing what different funding scenarios would mean for service equity, and articulating the costs of disinvestment. They also need to create internal systems that reward creativity and prudent risk-taking, so departments bring forward ideas, not just spending requests.

And for both groups, collaboration is essential. Budgeting should be seen as a joint strategy exercise—not just an annual compliance task. By aligning early on long-term service needs, growth projections, and fiscal guardrails, government leaders can better navigate tough choices when they arise and avoid the crisis-driven decision-making that undermines public trust and institutional resilience.

Ultimately, budgeting in government is about building the future while delivering in the present. Getting that right requires shared clarity—not just about where the money is going but about the goals it’s meant to achieve.

And that’s a far cry from managing a checkbook.