The Top 3 Capital Projects Takeaways from the 2025 GFOA Annual Conference

One of the key themes to emerge from the 2025 Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Annual Conference centered on capital projects — a hallmark of government operations. Capital projects have unique concerns compared to other areas of budgeting, and we’ve included our biggest capital project-related takeaways from the 2025 GFOA Annual Conference below.

Takeaway 1: The multifaceted benefits of capital planning can’t be underestimated

Ambitious projects always benefit from great plans. But capital planning holds a number of advantages for local governments and school districts that extend beyond bringing projects to fruition. 

A municipal utility commission leader in California outlined how capital planning serves the following functions: 

• Infrastructural integrity: Capital planning addresses deferred maintenance and ensures infrastructure reliability.
• Financial health: Capital planning avoids reactive (or emergency) spending and creates predictable financial forecasts.
• Strategic soundness: Capital planning aligns investment with strategic priorities and helps combat uncertainty.
• Citizen engagement: Capital planning (including the planning documents that result from it) builds public trust.

Takeaway 2: Leave no stone unturned when considering your capital projects’ finances

Finance is a major factor of every capital planning process. And as a Texas municipal finance director advocated during the GFOA Annual Conference, it’s essential to consider all sides of finance when you’re engaging in capital planning — whether it’s for 5 years ahead or for 25 years ahead.

The finance director highlighted the following as key cost considerations when capital planning:

• Establish the capital project costs of land acquisition, design, testing/inspection, and construction.
• Consider how inflation, contingency, your spending timeline, and bond issuance risk could affect your project costs.
• Identify all of the project’s impacts on your operating budget.

Then, it’s equally important to thoroughly consider how you fund your projects:

• Weigh your funding options. Will you be funding with cash and paying upfront with current revenues? Or will you be borrowing money, paying with your debt, and repaying creditors over time?  
• Identify your funding sources, whether they are tax sources, municipal bonds, or other sources like impact fees.
• Examine the legal restrictions and practical impacts of each funding option.

Takeaway 3: Illustrate the financial impact of capital projects in your Capital Improvement Plan documents

An important part of any public project is staying accountable and transparent to the public. With capital projects, that includes illustrating project timelines, progress, and impacts. But it’s just as important to show the financial impacts that your capital projects will have on the community. 

A great place to do this is in your Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) documents.  But CIPs can also  long, contain complicated language, and stay opaque about details. For community members who don’t understand finance or infrastructure, they can be a daunting read.

A municipal finance director in Illinois suggested the following best practices to encourage engagement with CIPs:

• Keeping financial information condensed and digestible.
• Comparing preventative maintenance costs to emergency repair costs. 
• Making relative comparisons to items that constituents may have in their personal budgets. 
• Conveying direct, high-level benefits of capital projects.

Managing your capital projects the BCM way

Planning, budgeting, reporting, and engagement are key components of successfully managing capital projects. These are also the four quadrants of modern Budget Cycle Management (BCM) —  a strategic framework that transforms budgeting into a holistic, streamlined set of planning and budget management practices. 

Any public agency can implement BCM. The goal of BCM is to ensure a seamlessly integrated approach to budgeting that involves all relevant teams with as little friction as possible. While BCM is best practiced with the entire budget cycle in mind, it can just as easily be practiced with capital projects specifically in mind.

Planning and Tracking

The first stage of BCM is Planning and Tracking. Practicing BCM effectively means building an active, ongoing strategic plan for your community. A key part of that planning is capital project planning. 

Strategic plans (and capital plans) built using BCM principles utilize the following:

• SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — that are also realistic with current resources and aligned with the community’s long-term vision.
• Actionable strategies with steps, timelines, milestones, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Centralized planning documentation, data monitoring, and performance reviews to track progress, with specific initiative owners actively contributing to the strategic plan.
• Shared ownership of keeping the community up to date on progress.  

Budgeting

In BCM, your strategic plan directly informs your budgeting. As we’ve seen, your capital project planning should also be tied to your budgeting.

Align your budget dollars with your community’s strategic plan by doing the following:

• Estimating costs for major initiatives.
• Allocating budgets and resources to ensure that your plan is funded through the coming years.
• Tracking your budget spend along with your data monitoring to inform subsequent years’ allocations.

Reporting and Engagement

And finally, it’s also important to properly tell your capital project story. BCM advocates making it easier for the public to understand the work that their local governments and school districts do. 

As we saw in the third takeaway, it’s incumbent on public leaders to make sure that the public understands what their dollars are funding. You can do that by integrating narrative, visuals, and performance data to engagingly explain financial reporting data.

ClearGov can help you engage, plan, budget, and report for your community throughout the entire budget cycle — not just with capital projects. Watch our product tour webinar and learn how ClearGov is making budgeting easier, more transparent, and future-proof for over 1,300 agencies!