In his 10 years as a Salt Lake County commissioner, Bart Barker stressed the importance of keeping an eye toward the future.

It didn't make sense, he argued then, to set budgets just for the next year or two.

To really balance revenues and the expenses of new programs, the county needed to look into a crystal ball and make the figures line up five years or more into the future.

So he and the county budget director at the time, Nelson Williams, led the push to move the county to a five-year budget plan.

"Often city officials, especially elected officials, don't really have all the information they need to make a long-term budget decision," Barker said.

Take a performing arts center, for example. The city might look at what it costs to build, but not fully understand the long-term costs of operations without looking beyond the immediate future.

"All your decisions are made sort of in the dark," Barker said, and the result can be a rude awakening when the bills come due.

Now, as a private consultant, the Draper resident is trying to persuade other cities and counties around the state to do the same, to ensure long-term structural stability, even in the face of turbulent economic times.

He and Williams are offering seminars and training courses for city and county officials, showing them how easy it is to convert to five-year budgeting and the benefits of doing so.

"We want to show them the value of budgeting long term, five years. We also want to make the budget process enjoyable," he said.

Enjoyable budgets?

Barker says it can happen.

"A city official's ability to control the future of the city lies almost entirely in his or her willingness to control the budget," he says. "Controlling the budget is controlling the future and that should be an exciting thing to do."

The federal government has worked based on five-year budget projections for decades; the state of Utah typically projects expenses for the current year and the coming two to three years.

But he says he's asked other cities why they don't put together longer-term budgets and he said they just don't know how to do it.

"If the federal government, as badly as they budget, can go out five years, every city in the state and every county in the state ought to benefit from that same opportunity," he said.

gehrke@sltrib.com