The 1989 Southeast Conference on Public Administration (SECOPA) was held in Clearwater Beach, Florida. Many members assumed that the location would make this SECOPA a big draw, and, not disappointing, many of the leaders of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and many prominent thinkers in budgeting and other areas of public administration were featured participants. One of the authors of this book was at that time a budget manager with the city of St. Petersburg, Florida. He had been a member of ASPA for ten years and was working on his doctoral dissertation in public administration. His professional career and educative efforts had been guided by the idea that public administration theory should seek to inform practice, and he managed to convince the budget director to make SECOPA the primary training event for her six-person staff that year.