Livermore-Amador Valley Transit Authority, California
A Special District Slashes Budgeting Time by 65% While Boosting Accuracy and Team Engagement

Primary Objective

Better Budgeting and More

Simplify budgeting workflows, increase accuracy, and improve collaboration across departments.

Challenge

From Dispatcher to Director… and Department Bottlenecks

Livermore-Amador Valley Transit Authority (LAVTA) provides public transit services such as its Wheels public buses, across California’s Tri-Valley region. The Tri-Valley region that LAVTA serves includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, and Dublin.

Tamara Edwards, LAVTA’s Director of Finance, started at the agency in 2004 as a dispatcher. Her career path and deep understanding of transit finance give her a unique appreciation for how budget decisions impact real lives. 

But while Edwards’ mission was clear, LAVTA’s budgeting process wasn’t.

Before adopting ClearGov, LAVTA relied entirely on Microsoft Word and Excel to manage its budgets and budget books. Budget proposals were created in Word, then manually translated into Excel. This disjointed process led to version control issues, a lack of visibility, and a heavy administrative burden on Edwards. 

The Excel-based personnel budget was highly fragile. Every employee’s benefits and pension contributions required separate calculations. With dozens of formulas packed into a single sheet, a single change risked breaking the entire model.

The budget book was pieced together from Word documents and Excel charts, making it clunky and hard to follow. Important financial details often never made it into the final, published version, leaving both the board and the public with only high-level summaries. 

Throughout the entire process, collaboration was limited. There was a lack of shared budgeting literacy among department heads. They often asked Edwards about their budget, as the budget files were password-protected to prevent unauthorized changes. This meant directors couldn’t easily access or understand their own budget data.

Solution

One Clear Path Forward

Edwards hadn’t actively searched for a new budgeting solution — until a sales pitch from another vendor proved too costly and uninspiring. When ClearGov reached out, she was skeptical. But after seeing a demo and hearing the pricing, she realized how quickly she could pick it up, even without being especially tech-savvy.

LAVTA first adopted ClearGov Capital Budgeting and Digital Budget Book. The goal was to start small with a product that involved fewer people and less complexity. This gave the team time to get familiar with the platform and helped Edwards demonstrate ClearGov’s value to other departments and leadership.

With Capital Budgeting, LAVTA’s Capital Projects Manager was able to take over project entry directly—something Edwards used to do herself. Digital Budget Book’s automatically generated formatting and visuals also gave Edwards a polished document she could share with confidence—without spending time formatting or designing layouts.

The success of that first rollout paved the way for LAVTA to subsequently adopt Operational Budgeting and Personnel Budgeting. This phased approach ensured buy-in across the organization and helped Edwards build internal champions for the platform.

We got the ClearGov Digital Budget Book, which we used the first year with Capital Budgeting. And that also helped me sell it to our board of directors because it was so much more vibrant and just honestly prettier than anything I ever put together.

Tamara Edwards, Director of Finance, Livermore-Amador Valley Transit Authority, CA

Implementation

From Panic to Proficiency

Despite early concerns about the time commitment, Edwards found the onboarding process surprisingly manageable. ClearGov’s team worked closely with her to accommodate LAVTA’s unique account structures and provided fast, responsive support throughout the setup. As additional products were implemented, ClearGov’s support staff remained highly responsive — jumping on same-day calls to help Edwards troubleshoot her own learning curve.

ClearGov was so much easier. I saved so much time not having to go back and forth with people on what they really wanted and translating the information they gave me into the budget.

Results

More Time Savings and Detail, Plus Empowered Staff

ClearGov helped LAVTA achieve many improvements to the district’s budgeting processes, such as:

• 65% reduction in time spent on budgeting: LAVTA cut Edwards’s workload from more than 120 hours to roughly 40–50 hours using ClearGov’s solutions.
  
• Clearer capital project documentation: Thanks to ClearGov Capital Budgeting, LAVTA’s capital project entries now include full descriptions and funding details, giving the board better visibility into proposed work.
  
• Individualized employee budgeting with real benefit modeling: Edwards used ClearGov Personnel Budgeting to create records for each employee and retiree to calculate actual benefit costs, improving LAVTA’s budgeting accuracy. Personnel Budgeting’s employee‑level modeling feature also allowed Edwards to capture real benefit costs for every staff member and retiree, which she previously estimated manually in Excel.
  
• Hands-on, self-service access for each department: ClearGov Operational Budgeting’s department‑level access gave directors direct control over their own accounts. Directors now enter more detailed information, knowing they’ll need to reference it later. And they can now answer their own budget questions by logging directly into ClearGov, instead of relying on Edwards.
  
• A more engaging, navigable, and detailed budget book: Digital Budget Book’s interactive layout and transparency features made it easier for board members to explore the budget, leading to questions and comments they didn’t get before. LAVTA’s Digital Budget Book now includes historical budget information, which board members use to compare past and current years.
  

ClearGov helped LAVTA simplify its budgeting process and involve more departments with less manual work. ClearGov can help your government do the same.

With ClearGov Personnel Budgeting, being able to build out each employee just made our budget so much more accurate. I love all the ClearGov products, but that was the one that I was really able to sell to our board with the promise that you’re actually going to be able to track our personnel budget and understand what’s going on.

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