There is no shortage of proposed solutions to the fiscal crises New York municipalities are grappling with.

But one of the simplest strategies—developing multiyear financial plans and posting them for all to see—has yet to catch on.

“To an amazing degree, there is a dearth of public, systematic, uniform, comprehensive multiyear planning on a local government level in New York,” E.J. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, said at City & State’s “State of Emergency” conference. “In fact, even as we sit here today, only a handful of local governments in New York not just maintain but publish multiyear financial plans. You can’t begin to meaningfully get a grasp on the problems of local governments until you have a multiyear plan in hand.”

Marc Shaw, a veteran budget official at the city and state level, noted that multiyear financial planning was imposed on New York City during its severe fiscal crisis in the 1970s. The use of long-term planning helped position the city for its comeback, Shaw said. Today the city publishes plans looking ahead four years, and they are updated on a quarterly basis.

“One of the positive things that came out of the fiscal crisis was the concept of not looking at budgets on an annual basis but to do more long-term planning,” Shaw said. “One of the reasons why it is so important is that it allows one to look at the longterm consequences of the decisions one is making, to look at what the driving forces are that are causing the structural budget problems, so that you have a more intelligent debate about what needs to be done to solve those problems.”

However, relatively few municipalities around the state have followed New York City’s lead.

“The irony is that many local governments and school districts do in fact engage in multiyear planning as an internal planning mechanism, but do not share those plans with the public,” McMahon said. “We can’t actually have a discussion of these issues in many cases until we have multiyear plans on the table. Local governments continue to find reasons for resisting this, even those that actually do it as an internal mechanism, and it’s really essential.”