Urban Policy Making and Subjective Service Evaluations: Are They Compatible?

Abstract

1978). 15. The approach is spelled out in some detail in Bahl, Schroeder and Zorn, Government Revenue and Expenditure Forecasting: Dallas, Texas. 16. Note that there is no attempt to forecast future policy changes; this hesitancy to predict future political actions is, in general, the approach used in each of the major cities currently forecasting expenditures. See Bahl and Schroeder, Forecasting Local Government Budgets. 17. For an interesting discussion of these issues, in general, see Garry D. Brewer, Where the Twain Meet: Reconciling Science and Politics in Analysis, Policy Sciences, Vol. 13 (June 1981), pp. 269-279. 18. The City of Portland, Oregon further restricts this assumption by assuming that wage increases will not offset the previous year's purchasing power loss when inflation is above 8.0 percent. City of Portland, Bureau of Management and Budget, Preliminary Five Year Projection, Memorandum dated January 9, 1981, p. 8. 19. Although its forecasts were public, the approach used in New York City in the late 1970s was to include no increases in money wages in the projections other than those already included in multi-year union contracts. While the technique divulged no information of strategic value to the unions, it also greatly limited the reasonableness of the forecast results. 20. Indeed, William Ascher, Forecasting, An Appraisal for PolicyMakers and Planners (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 199, argues that the assumptions underlying a forecast are more important than choice of forecast methodology in determining forecast accuracy. 21. San Antonio Department of Budget and Research, City of San Antonio, Long-Range Financial Forecast, Fiscal Years 19811986 (San Antonio, Texas: December, 1980), pp. 10-14. San Antonio's document also issues repeated warnings to the reader that the projected budgetary shortfalls are not prophecies of such outcomes but only indicators that policies must be undertaken to ensure that they will not arise. 22. City of Shreveport, MultiYear Forecast, 1981-1985 (Shreveport, Louisiana: 1981), pp. 6-10.