The City of Culver City is moving ahead with a new way of doing their municipal budget.
At the first Culver City Council meeting of 2026, on January 12, City’s Chief Financial Officer, Lisa Soghor was there to speak to A-2, “a presentation on priority driven budgeting and approval of demographics for civic assembly.”
Sogur began by noting that putting both things into one item was more efficient. “We felt it best to kind of combine them. We’re talking about the budget. We’re talking about the schedule for the next four or five months,” She joked with the council, “Happy new year. Here we are. We’re launching into budget. You’re going to be seeing a lot of me over the next four months.”
Odis Jones, Culver City’s new city manager, is a proponent of priority budgeting, and was cited by Soghor as having background and experience with the process.
In the past, city departments have presented their annual reports beginning in March, so that the budget could be finalized before the beginning of the fiscal new year. Often categorized as incremental budgeting, that process was very focused on city staff, keeping budgeting as an ‘inside job.’ This new form of budgeting, which will include more direct input from residents via the process of civic assembly, shifts the process significantly toward the community.
Soghor noted the new process “can be more inclusive and more transparent, reflecting the [community’s] priorities back to them.”
According to the Government Finance Officers Association, “Governments have traditionally used incremental budgeting, but priority-driven budgeting provides a more strategic alternative. Priority-driven budgeting allocates resources according to how well a program or service achieves the goals and objective that the community values most.”
The CFO offered that “In a priority driven approach, the government identifies it’s priorities, and then, through a collaborative evidence-based process, ranks programs or services according to how well they align with those priorities. Then the government allocates funding in accordance with those rankings.”
The process can be lengthy, up to 18 months, but the city will be doing an “abbreviated and accelerated” process to be able to develop a budget by May of 2026.
As an aside, Soghor modestly mentioned to the council that “I sent you all something earlier about how, for our 40th consecutive year, got the distinguished budget award [from the GFOA] and for I think it’s like year 37, we also got the award for our annual comprehensive financial reporting. “
The finance department will report on the mid-year budget at the first City Council meeting in February.
Community meetings on the priority budgeting process are expected to begin in March, with exact dates and locations yet to be announced.
