Spokane city government is romancing a new budget approach, but whether it blossoms into a long and loving relationship or wilts after a brief flirtation will depend on the level of commitment by two important groups: citizens and city officials.

The fresh approach, called Price of Government, makes intuitive good sense. It starts with the idea that taxpayers are willing to pay so much for local government and they want certain things in return. Citizens’ expectations are defined as broad outcomes — safety, health, ease of transportation — and the city then comes up with ways to achieve them and to measure its progress.

If the theory holds, the government will concentrate its finite resources on doing a limited number of essential things but doing them well. It will not dilute critical services in order to keep non-essential ones afloat. It will encourage all departments to be creative and bold in bidding for the responsibility to carry out specific strategies.

At a City Council retreat today, the mayor’s office will deliver a handful of priority statements which purport to reflect the outcomes that Spokane citizens most want from city government. By July 26, the administration is scheduled to give the council a Price of Government budget that reduces 2004 spending by 5 percent.

If advocates of the new model are right, city officials will shed old assumptions about delivering city services and find innovative ways to do the top-priority work better and more efficiently. Vigorous citizen input will tell them whether they’re on the right track or need to reconsider.

These are promising concepts, but they sound similar in many ways to budget fads of the past two or three decades — zero-based budgeting, management by objective, reinventing government.

To keep Price of Government from becoming just another gimmick, it will take a couple of things public officials and citizens both struggle with: openness to true change and genuine commitment to public involvement.

Those in government have a hard time embracing new ways of delivering services, especially when it puts their jobs or their departments at risk — as the present crisis does. The public, meanwhile, regardless of its frustrations about or its expectations of government, seldom invests the time and energy necessary to make a public-involvement process work.

City officials are looking at the new budget approach not just to address the current revenue shortfall, but also to build a framework for developing the 2005 budget from the ground up. There isn’t time for an adequate public-input process for the short-term task, but to sustain this approach, city leaders must begin now to enlist broad public input for the 2005 process.

That budget has to be adopted before Dec. 31. Using the best available information — public comments gathered from other, non-budget exercises — city department officials have determined priorities on behalf of citizens. That’s a necessary expediency when time is short, but in the long term the process will be authentic only if citizens set their own priorities, and stay vigorously engaged throughout the process.

City government must make sure it extends that opportunity, and citizens must take advantage of it in substantial numbers.