The City of Kennewick prepares a biennial budget, which serves to allocate funding to the City's programs and services for the next fiscal year. The City utilizes a "Program Budget" approach, which focuses on the quality of each service citizens receive from the City. The goal of the program budget is to provide the City Council, citizens and other stakeholders a more focused analysis of the costs of each City service or function, whether the service is provided by one department or through the combined efforts of several areas.
Additionally, the City prepares and adopts an update to its 6-year Capital improvement Program (CIP) in conjunction with the preparation of its biennial budget. These policy documents are prepared together and consolidated into one document to improve the effectiveness of the capital improvement planning process and ensure consistency between the City's budget, CIP and Comprehensive Plan.