Nothing drags down public enterprise more than the hamster wheel of the annual budget cycle.

This year, both the size of the cuts and the timing were dismal, with municipal and nonprofit budgets just days from going into effect for the July 1 fiscal year when it happened again, like the return of a migraine. Worse still, this fiscal year is unlikely to be the bottom of the budget pit. Until the General Assembly initiates real tax reform, the task is to make the best of shrinking resources.

Every municipal government, school board and nonprofit agency that builds its budget around the cycle of the state's distributions knows painfully that the system is as broken as the budget. The recipients of state aid can either keep on coping with the rise and fall of expectations or take steps to manage the future.

It's a smaller-scale challenge but not unlike the one that local leaders so spectacularly met when the Naval Submarine Base was threatened in 2005. Times were inexorably changing, but partnership and leadership emerged, with the results renewing the region.

It's not hard to find experienced guides for this task. Businesses of all sizes have been practicing the black art of downsizing since the start of the Great Recession. Owners and managers are right here, and could, if consulted, advise on good business practices for the public and nonprofit sectors.

The first advice they might offer is to see your town or agency less as an aid recipient and more as a managing partner doing tasks that the state needs done. You are not in line for the dole. You are a partner in an enterprise.

Managing partners manage. They view the year through quarters of realized goals and unexpected bumps in the road, they rebudget all year long. Most of all they take control of the budget cycle by deciding realistically at the beginning what is, or is not, worth doing.

This is a democracy and a tax-paying economy, so a municipal managing partner needs to consider her constituents' priorities the same way a business manager considers the interests of customers and stockholders. The same goes for nonprofits. People are only too well aquainted with the ratio between their personal income and outflow; they don't need much explanation of how it works.

What they do need — and the leader who recognizes this will lead the charge for change — is to be consulted on what matters most to them. Schools? Policing? Parks? On a scale of 1 to 100, what will be at the top or at the bottom of the list? Would you rather have constructive input than a divisive taxpayer petition later on? Start the budgeting process by inviting citizens to serve on matching advisory groups for revenue and for expenditures.

The second big, businesslike consideration: Is a specific item valued enough to warrant new sources to help pay for it? What revenue plan can be assembled that might include non-traditional assets? Groton and Stonington, some years back, started foundations for their schools. Other models build on regional sharing, like LEARN, the educational service agency that runs special education programs for towns more cost-effectively than one town could.

Is that so hard to imagine for other services that have been kept immune from regionalization in our tiny towns? Diversification of revenue streams can start any time. Regionalization will happen when economics force it upon us, but local governments could take action first and ensure a voice in what ultimately happens.

The reality that won't change is that many costs, including negotiated wages and benefits, are fixed. That's why programs that government isn't legally obligated to provide take the early hits: social services, mental health, respite care, free meals. In business, the model would be to find partners to share the risk and the benefits. Can your town imagine doing that? Ask the citizens, the faith communities, any business with a vested interest in the community.

None of this is a knock on the elected officials and volunteers who have been carrying the ball forever. About the loneliest places on Planet Connecticut are the meetings of public boards when they are doing routine business, generally in the months between budgeting cycles, or from now to December. Consider this a prime time to think like managers about next year and to enlist new allies — the business owners, people with experience in regional enterprises, supporters of good schools or social services.

And give the people who are brave enough to run for legislative office this fall a message: Tell them this year it's going to be different. It has to be.

Lisa McGinley is a former deputy managing editor of The Day.