Innovation Awards

Innovation Awards City of Ukiah & Midpeninsula Open Space District

In 2019, CSMFO received 124 applications for our awards programs, with 161 CSMFO members volunteering their time to serve as budget, CAFR and innovation reviewers. (104) of the applications received were for the Operating Budget Award Program, (2) for the Capital Budget Award Program, and 2 for the Innovation Award Program. The Innovation Award recognizes innovation in public sector finance in a variety of areas, including accounting, treasury, and procurement. An Innovation Review Panel comprised of CSMFO board members and Recognition Committee leadership score the applications. The Innovation Review Panel can choose to present up to three awards per year. We are pleased to present two Innovation Awards this year: The first Innovation Award, and in no particular order, goes to the City of Ukiah for their Electronic Budget. Over the last two years, the City of Ukiah has taken budgeting to new heights in an effort to streamline their budget process. Partnering with OpenGov, the City budget team worked with Council to establish a centered focus on transparency. The City of Ukiah created an interactive budget book that is meant to be all electronic. Various reports were created and uploaded to the OpenGov platform. These reports give the reader an interactive experience by allowing them to review the budget data at a high level or drill down for detail. Budget to actual information is live data that is updated each evening for tracking and use by all types of end users. The second Innovation Award goes to Midpeninsula Open Space District for their Midpeninsula Project Central. The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, or Midpen, is a special district managing over 63,000 acres of public land in 26 open space preserves in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. As a Special District, they are a small team managing many large projects to protect natural open space lands, construct public access improvements, and restore and enhance open space land. Midpen developed Project Central to unify project information and financials to improve collaboration and transparency. Project Central is a project management system which provides a tool for project managers to store and collaborate on documents, track project tasks and budgets, and communicate project status across the organization. Project Central’s dashboards roll up project statuses, providing the executive team summary level views across Midpen’s project portfolio.

Year In Review Joan Michaels Aguilar

Joan Michaels Aguilar, 2019 CSMFO President

Some Magical Memories to Share Can it be possible that the 2020 CSMFO Conference in Anaheim, aka Disney, has come and gone already? I hope that you had as an amazing experience, as I did, between the educational sessions, vendor exhibit and special events. So many sessions were standing room only, even the ones that were repeat sessions! I had the good fortune to wear multiple hats during this conference. It concluded my year as 2019 President and I had the privilege to pass the gavel to incoming 2020 President, Steve Heide. Steve was great in allowing me to be a member of the Host Committee to help plan the conference knowing I am a BIG Disney fan, as well as act as a liaison to one of our out of state guests from Oregon, Kathy Leader. Since this is our annual print edition, I expect you will see other authors and articles share the special moments at events such as the President’s Dinner held at Napa Rose and the Wednesday Late Night event at California Adventure which was so much fun, even though it was a late evening. Plus, we had some great awards bestowed this year with our Volunteer of the Year, Jennifer Wakeman leading our efforts on student engagement and two Distinguished Service Award honorees – 2012 Past President Laura Nomura and former Board Member David Cain. All three award recipients remain very active in CSMFO activities. I made some notes in my phone from a couple of our speakers as their words resonated with me. • Stop Looking and Start Leading – Jeffrey Barnes aka Dr. Disney our keynote speaker at Wednesday’s lunch • Done standing on the sidelines of my life – Jeffrey Barnes • Optimism over adversity – Steve Gross – Friday keynote speaker – Life is Good Co. • Toxic stress can destroy optimism – Steve Gross