Budget and Accountability Act

[Rose Springvale]

At its last meeting, the SC, pursuant to a request submitted by the Chancellor, ruled as follows:

"The RA has the constitutional responsibility for long term planning, and the authority to direct expenditures by the Chancellor beyond what is specified in the constitution as the duty of the Chancellor to pay for maintenance and administration. Therefore the Chancellor must submit the budget to the RA for approval, and follow whatever policies and procedures are enacted into law regarding said budget."

The SC strongly encouraged the RA to adopt procedures so that responsibilities are clear. This is my draft of such a law, which will be on the agenda for the next meeting of the RA. If others have different ideas, please post them.

This authority for this act comes from Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution of the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, Article 2, Sections 2,3, 8 and 9.

CDSL 13-11 Budget and Accountability Act

1. No payments shall be made by the executive without first having a budget approved by the RA. For purposes of this Act, the budget shall include only discretionary spending and not tier payment to Linden Lab.
2. The Chancellor shall present, the budget for each term for approval by the Representative Assembly, by posting and notification to the LRA, no later than the thirtieth day of each term.
3. The Representative Assembly may approve the budget as posted, send it back for revision or reject it, within thirty days of posting.
4. Revisions must be made by the Chancellor within 14 days of the response from the RA. Failure by the Chancellor to revise and re-post shall be deemed a rejection of the budget.
5. Failure of the Representative Assembly to revise, reject or approve the budget within thirty days of posting shall be deemed approval as posted.
6. Changes in the budget in excess of 10% of the total discretionary funds shall be resubmitted to the RA for approval.

[Sudane Erato]

Just a question for clarification...

Given point one, and the calendar requirements described in points 2, 3 and 5, it appears completely possible that the provision of point one would not be achieved until 3 months into a term. During that period, no "discretionary" spending would be possible.

Is the intent here to cause the 6-month budget period to lag by 3 months the 6-month RA term? (which would work... except that for as much as half of their administration, a succeeding chancellor would be bound by the budget of the preceding chancellor). If not, I would think that some kind of provision for discretionary spending would be needed while the budget approval process is still proceeding to prevent a community shutdown for fully half of the time.

Sudane....................................

[Rose Springvale]

I thought about that Sudane, but want enough teeth in the act to actually GET a budget presented, and operative early in the term. While the new chancellor MAY take up to a month, and the RA may then take up to a month to approve or reject, that's not in the best interest of the community and I'd hope both would be eager to fund the programs, employees, etc, especially if they knew payments and events would STOP without action.

My personal preference would be that chancellor candidates actually campaign with a proposed budget, and that the elected RA take it up at their first meeting so that the Community hits the ground running. If the chancellor merely wished to continue the plan of the former chancellor, all they need to do is copy and paste. I think we need to give the people who run for office credit for actually wanting to participate in government, and let them. Since we work on a reimbursement system anyway, reasonable payments included in the budget eventually authorized wouldn't be jeopardized, but unreasonable ones, like 10,000L for a dj, might get more consideration.

We do need to think about interrim measures, as i believe we've now institutionalized the inaugural ball for the first weekend of the term, but that should probably be included in the budget of the former term.

This scenario keeps us from not having a budget all term, as happened earlier this year, (no budget was ever presented in the first term of 2010,) and lets the RA know when changes are made and have input, as has not happened this term ("second revised budget" posted but not presented to RA on October 10, over 4 months into the second six month term.) I suppose there should be some method for the RA to authorize a budget if the chancellor fails to present one, but i'm confident that the people who run for office will do so in good faith and do their best to do their job.