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Grading the Cities introduction THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT Matching Up Cities and States
A year ago, Governing published a special issue, very much like this one — but dedicated to management in the states, instead of the cities. Putting the two together, we now have studied nearly 100 of the most important governments in the country (we plan on writing about counties in a couple of years, which should fill out the triad). So it seems only natural to start drawing some comparisons.
The most significant difference — also the most obvious — in managing government at these two different levels is that cities have to overcome onerous obstacles placed in their way by the states. For example, New Orleans balances its budget on a wing and a prayer because of tax restrictions set up for it by Louisiana. New York City and Buffalo both suffer in human resources because they have to comply with a variety of strangulating rules imposed by the legislature in Albany. States don’t face that particular problem (although some might argue that mandates from Washington are a comparable headache).
Cities tend to benefit from much smoother relations between their legislative and executive branches. In those with a manager-council form of government, most of the administrative control is centered in the manager’s office — not divided between a governor and legislature. Even in mayor-council cities, with seeming potential for rivalry between the mayor’s office and the council chamber, we found few conflicts as difficult to work through as those in states such as California, North Carolina and North Dakota.
The absence of such problems has paid off notably well in capital management. In state after state last year, capital improvement plans were carefully thought through by the executive branch, only to be largely ignored by a legislature eager to start cutting ribbons. To be sure, this phenomenon exists in cities as well — Richmond is one good example — but to a far lesser extent.
Managing cities seems a less ideological process virtually all across the board. In many states, we discovered factions that essentially didn’t believe in government at all. In the generally well-run state of Utah, an anti-government coalition in the legislature had successfully weakened efforts at strategic planning, on the theory that it’s not the government’s role to plan for the future; the citizens should be doing that at the ballot box. On city councils, this element doesn’t make itself nearly as evident.
Some of the biggest city-state differences are in human resource management — the only area in which the cities’ grades were notably lower than those of the states. The reasons for this aren’t hard to see. Civil service rules set up originally to counter patronage and corruption are much more restrictive in the cities than in the states. Only a handful of states have restricted flexibility in their hiring processes, while many of the cities do — often because the states forced it upon them. Perhaps as a result of these constraints, cities are conducting more experiments with incentives and performance-pay programs than the states. They are doing it, in some places, out of desperation.
Cities seem to have better connections between performance appraisals and broad-based objectives and goals. By nature, goals at the statewide level tend to be diffuse, seeking to balance diverse constituencies. States play a tricky political game that balances, say, growth pressures in urban areas with favorable treatment of agricultural interests. Cities seem to be doing a better job of working through the diversity to reach concrete objectives.
Interesting as these comparisons are, it’s worth pointing out that direct comparison is a little dangerous. First of all, the bar against which we’ve judged governmental entities has gotten higher just in the past year — particularly in the fast-moving areas of managing for results and information technology. In MFR, cities are using techniques as good as or better than the ones states were using last year. But, it’s fair to assume, the states themselves have also improved. The upshot is that we were looking for more sophisticated measures this year than last, merely to justify the same grade.
In information technology, states got credit last year just for having a decent Web site with plentiful information about agencies and programs. The few that were able to handle customer transactions on the sites really stood out from the pack. This year, by contrast, we sought out the capacity to apply for jobs, pay parking tickets or get licenses on the Web. Information alone is no longer very impressive.
Meanwhile, even as good grades in information technology have become more difficult to achieve, cities have benefited (as, doubtless, states also have in the year just passed) from the ominous encroachment of Y2K, with all its predicted technological disasters. In many cases, city governments changed processes and upgraded equipment in order to ward off the bug. This was already happening a year ago, but the process has clearly accelerated since then.
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