Grading the Cities introduction THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT Report Card: Dallas Revenue Rank: 16 Form of Government: Council-Manager Mayor: Ronald Kirk (took office 1995) City Manager: Teodoro Benavides (appointed 1998) City Council: 14 members, elected by district FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: B+ Although it lacks long-range focus, Dallas does an excellent job of estimating near-term revenues and expenditures. Revenues came in just 0.6 percent over estimates in fiscal 1999; you can’t get much better than that. Dallas’ debt policies are strong, as are its investment and cash management practices, with triple-A ratings from both Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service, and cost accounting is better than in most places. The rainy day fund is a bit of a problem — it’s tiny — but Dallas tries to keep its undedicated balance in the 3 to 4 percent range. The city aggressively seeks citizen input into the budgeting process. The proposed budget is available in libraries, and some summary information goes on the Internet. During preparations on the current budget, the council hosted about 40 town hall meetings. The actual budget document was completely reformatted last year and is now far easier to understand. The biggest difficulty Dallas has in the financial field is its primary pension plan, which has been seriously underfunded. The city says it recognizes the problem and is upping contributions. HUMAN RESOURCES: C Dallas has a peculiar personnel system, in which two departments — Civil Service and Human Resources — share overall responsibility for recruitment and hiring. There’s no simple logic that explains which applicants are handled by which offices. These decisions were made “at the dawn of time,” says one personnel official, likely based on power struggles long since forgotten. The city manager would like to rationalize the process, and a unified employment center is in the works. But as things stand, some applicants have to go to two different locations to apply for virtually identical jobs. There is no specific work force plan in place, but Dallas is making some progress on succession planning. The problem here, in part, is that the human resources information technology system is user-hostile; data can be accessed only by IT employees. For the past five years, the city has tied salary increases to performance appraisals for all but uniformed employees. The employees seem happy with the new system, but supervisors need more training in performance review, and in avoiding the “everyone-is-above-average” syndrome. Right now, more than 50 percent of the workers are rated as exceptional. Even Lake Wobegon never claimed that high a percentage. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: D+ IT has long been a mess in Dallas. Most of the information systems in the city aren’t integrated, and except for the financial management system (which works pretty well), it’s difficult to get access to the data that exists. “If you wanted to know how much sick leave every person in the city has had,” says the CIO, Dan McFarland, “we’d have to go to several applications. I was brought here to change that.” There are plenty of other changes that need to be made as well. Standardization of systems is just in its beginning stages. The police, city attorney, fire department and water department each have their own local area networks. There are scores of different permutations and combinations of desktop software. “The city has historically been deeply decentralized,” McFarland says. “We’re going to attempt to turn it around in a dramatic way.” Things do seem to be on the way toward improvement. In the few months since McFarland arrived as the city’s first CIO, a long-term strategic plan has been developed and is going through an approval process. There also has been noticeable progress in technology training procedures for city employees. CAPITAL MANAGEMENT: B- Dallas only goes through a thorough capital-planning process when the time comes to borrow money, roughly every three or four years. A multi-departmental task force prioritizes projects, the city manager recommends a program to the council, and public meetings and comment are invited. The published document that results is somewhat difficult to read and lacks justification or analysis of projects. There is a list of major repair and replacement needs for city buildings that is prioritized annually. The city’s pavement management system has more than 12 years of recorded data on the condition of its streets. The goal is to have 75 percent of Dallas’ streets in satisfactory condition by 2010. The city is at 71 percent now — way ahead of schedule. MANAGING FOR RESULTS: B Dallas has been working at performance measurement for years. At one time, it was billed as a national leader. But there’s a growing sense that the system isn’t working the way it should be. The city does create many measures — outputs and outcomes, and they are presented in the budget. Indeed, the city still stands out for comprehensive data collecting. The question is how much of the data is useful. “We need to be sure that performance measures are results-driven and actually tell us something,” says one city official. “We found that they often weren’t measuring the right things.” Although the city council has generally trusted the data and used it for making decisions, to their credit, council members are anxious for improvements in the quality and clarity of information they receive. Recently, Dallas hired a big-five management consultant to review its entire performance measurement system. A new strategic plan for the city is in effect, and each city department is responsible for coming up with a strategic plan of its own. AVERAGE GRADE: C+ Copyright © 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.