SMART Budgeting. Our Hope for a Better State?

What exactly is SMART budgeting? The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent budgeting. It requires agencies that provide services and policy makers who manage the government to cooperate. Together they establish goals and performance objectives that are measurable. This creates a way to gauge results and ferret out obstacles. The program was introduced in 2004 as an initiative from the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA) based at Samford University in Birmingham and funded by a grant from the Hugh Kaul Foundation.