What GFOA 2026 Taught Me About the Weight Finance Leaders Carry

A First-Timer's Reflection

I wore the pin.

The first-timer pin on my badge at GFOA 2026 is hard to miss, and apparently, so are the people wearing it. More than one veteran attendee noticed it immediately, offered a knowing smile, and said some version of the same thing: "You're going to leave this very differently than you arrived."

They were right. I just didn't know how right until the closing session at McCormick Place down the street from Soldier Field.

I came to Chicago for GFOA's 120th Annual Conference with a confidence I understood the challenges of state and local government Finance. I am immersed in this community. I've devoured the reports, inhaled the briefs, and heard the talking points about fiscal pressure and modernization. I thought I had a fairly reasonable picture.

Four days and eighty-plus sessions later, I realized the picture I had was a thumbnail.

I mean, actually read it. Title by title.

"Turbulence Ahead." "When the Magic Runs Out." "Strings Definitely Attached." "Don't Worry Your Life Away." "Make No Small Plans."

I remember stopping on that last one and thinking: Who titles a government Finance session like this? The answer, I'd learn, is a community that had historically been quietly carrying something large and has decided to stop pretending it isn't.

The veterans around me had already marked their sessions before they landed. They utilized the catalog the way one used a map of a city they were familiar with but still needed help navigating. For me, reading it cold, it was the first signal that I had underestimated what I was walking into.

I did what first-timers do: I moved between sessions, sat in on conversations I wasn't sure I belonged in, ate lunch next to people I didn't know, and listened.

Here's what the conference told me, over and over, in different rooms and different voices:

1. Revenue has become unpredictable in ways that annual budgeting can't absorb.

"Turbulence Ahead: Navigating Current Challenges through Long-Term Planning" generated a visceral response in me. Revenue uncertainty, inflation, and political resistance are all pressing at once. Governments that expanded recurring programs during the surplus years are now discovering structural gaps mid-cycle, when options for response are most limited. "Strengthen Your Budget Bedrock with Long-Term Planning" argued that connecting today's budget to multi-year financial health isn't an advanced practice anymore. It's what elected officials and the public now demand at a minimum.

2. Federal funding is both essential and dangerous.

I sat in "Strings Definitely Attached: Navigating Federal Procurement Requirements" and emerged with a new appreciation for how complex this has become: layers of agency-specific rules, obligation timelines, and audit exposure that most teams are managing with tools not built for it. "Family Matters: What Recent Federal Changes to Social Safety Net Programs Mean for You" drove home the downstream impact of federal shifts on Medicaid, the ACA, and SNAP — programs that states and counties don't just receive funding for, but administer. The hallway conversation I kept overhearing: " How do you build programs on temporary money without leaving your community stranded when it ends?

3. Long-term liabilities don't wait for a good year.

From bond strategy to reserve policy ("Don't Worry Your Life Away: Developing and Maintaining Appropriate Reserve Levels"), I heard the same stalking truth: governments that model capital, pension, debt service, and operating budgets in separate environments eventually discover a problem in Year 3 of a 10-year plan with almost no room to correct.

4. Workforce decisions are long-term financial commitments, and they aren't always modeled that way.

"From Combative to Collaborative: A Better Approach to Police Staffing Conversations" was one of the most honest sessions I attended. It was a room full of Finance officers and budget professionals who have had that conversation with a department chief and know how badly it can go without data grounding it. A four-year labor agreement looks manageable in the near term. The pension and healthcare tail is a different story. "Rethinking the Finance Office with Shared Services" showed how some organizations are rebuilding their Finance function from the ground up, not to reduce headcount, but to create capacity for the analytical work that the moment actually requires.

5. The tools most teams are using weren't built for this environment.

"Bots Behind the Books" on robotic process automation, "Better With You" on technology alignment, "A Beautiful Mess" on modernizing treasury operations they were all pointing at the same gap. Finance teams spending their hours on manual reconciliation and spreadsheet consolidation instead of scenario modeling and forward-looking policy guidance. That's not a skills problem. That's an infrastructure problem.

I nearly skipped "When the Magic Runs Out: Building Credibility to Advise on Difficult Decisions." It was late in the day. My feet hurt. I had already hit four sessions.

I went anyway. I'm glad I did.

The premise, stated succinctly: doing more with less is not sustainable. Every Finance leader eventually reaches the moment when they can no longer simply find the money. And if trust hasn't been built before that moment arrives, trust earned through consistent, honest, forward-looking counsel, then the Finance function loses its seat at the table exactly when the community needs it most.

I've worked alongside Finance leaders for a while. But sitting in that room, I felt, maybe for the first time, the weight of what that actually means. The gap between the leader they are trying to be: strategic advisor, trusted steward, the person guiding difficult decisions before they become crises and what fragmented tools and backward-looking processes actually allow them to do: react, report, and explain yesterday instead of shaping tomorrow.

That gap isn't a personal failure. It's a structural one. But it falls on real people, in real communities, every day.

Monday's general session with Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code and his newest book, Flourish, gave me a different frame for the same thing. Coyle's research on high-performing teams shows that belonging, shared purpose, and psychological safety aren't soft concepts. They are the conditions under which people do their best work. For Finance leaders, that's not inspiration, it's a description of what it looks like when a Finance function is actually working: integrated with leadership, trusted across departments, present at the table where it matters.

I took more notes in those two sessions than in the rest of the conference combined.

When jurisdictions took the stage to share their experience, I started to notice a pattern.

The successful teams were ones that could model a scenario in hours, not weeks. Teams that exhibited less panic were ones who caught the federal funding cliff before it became a crisis. These were teams that walked into a difficult budget conversation with complete downstream visibility and real credibility. They weren't necessarily working harder than the organizations still struggling.

They were working within a different kind of infrastructure: one where revenue forecasting, grant management, workforce planning, capital and debt modeling, and long-term liability projections aren't separate exercises. They live in the same connected financial architecture. When one assumption changes, everything adjusts. Leadership can see the full picture. And Finance gets to do the job it's actually there to do.

That's the difference between the session titled "When the Magic Runs Out" and the one titled "Make No Small Plans: Addressing Big Challenges in Your Community." The governments in that second session, the ones tackling homelessness, affordability, and economic recovery at scale, weren't doing it through heroic individual effort. They were doing it because their Finance function could support bold decisions with clear, credible numbers.

On the last afternoon, I stood near the lakeside entrance of McCormick Place waiting for my car. My first-timer ribbon was still on. My feet were done.

And I kept thinking about a phrase I'd heard in "Money, Myths, and Misinformation: Making Government Finance Make Sense" which wasa session about public trust in an era of institutional skepticism and AI-generated everything. The speaker said that public trust in government Finance has never been more fragile, or more essential.

That's the thread that connected everything at #GFOA2026 for me.

Revenue volatility, federal funding uncertainty, long-term liabilities, workforce costs, and fragmented systems are not a list of separate problems to solve. They are the shape of one large challenge: how do Finance leaders maintain the trust of their communities, of elected officials, credit rating agencies, auditors, and residents that are all livining in an environment where the ground keeps shifting, and the tools most of them use were built for a simpler world?

The answer I kept hearing, from practitioners who are doing it, is a connected financial framework is essential. No more point solutions. Not another tool layered on top of fragmented infrastructure. A unified architecture that makes continuous fiscal management possible: modeling risk before it becomes a crisis, stress-testing assumptions before budget adoption, telling a clear financial story to the people who need to hear it.

I came to Chicago to learn about this community. I leave with genuine respect for what they carry, and real clarity about what actually helps.

The badge was just paper. The education was the real thing.

Interested in how a unified financial platform supports the Finance leaders doing this work every day? Explore how OneStream is built for this moment.