|
|
Grading the Cities introduction THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Introduction: 35-City Average Grade: B-
That seems fair. The process of establishing long-term planning, and holding staffers accountable for real results, is far more difficult than it often seems at first. As one early advocate of these efforts put it, “The problem is when the vision meets the real world.”
Fortunately, the vision seems to have caught on. In the 35 municipalities we studied, managing-for-results efforts are widespread and growing. Performance measurement is increasingly hooked into strategic planning — with larger objectives cascading down to departmental goals, and in the most successful cities, to employee goals and individual performance appraisals as well.
Austin, San Antonio, Indianapolis and Virginia Beach have fully developed systems. There’s always room for improvement, but in each of these cities, the effort to manage for results has substantially changed the way business is done. More municipalities, including Philadelphia, Seattle and Jacksonville, have made solid progress in recent years.
Even Detroit and Washington, D.C., are on track. This is truly remarkable news. Less than five years ago, Detroit had to worry more about a huge accumulated deficit than about measuring the number of cases of measles in town. At about the same time, one D.C. official proclaimed, “There’s no performance-based anything in the District of Columbia.” Now, says Norman S. Dong, interim city administrator in D.C., “The mindset and the recognition of the importance of performance management is clear.”
The national leader in this field, however, is Phoenix. Planning and measurement have led to countless improvements in service delivery there. When the city decided to address truancy, it experimented with digging into attendance records and informing parents where problems might be cropping up. When declining truancy rates proved this to be a successful approach, the city council increased funding for clerical help, so the schools could expand on it.
But the best-publicized example of performance measurement has been in crime fighting, where a push for better performance has combined with new technological capacity to produce impressive results. New York City’s computer-based CompStat system — copied by Minneapolis and New Orleans, among other places — compiles a statistical summary of each week’s crime complaints, arrests and summons activities, as well as a recap of significant cases and crime patterns. A weekly report is generated and every precinct is ranked in complaint and arrest categories.
With this information, commanders can be held accountable for their results. Comparisons between commands can be made. Crime trends stand out, as do deviations and anomalies. While there’s a wide-ranging debate over the reasons behind the precipitous drop in crime in New York, no one would disagree that CompStat has been a major contributor.
Unfortunately, not every city can be Phoenix, and not every measurement system can be CompStat. Indeed, quite a few places seem to back off from tough performance measures as economic conditions improve, apparently on the theory that they aren’t needed anymore. Columbus, Ohio, lists departmental objectives in its budget, but has never been able to attach specific measures to them. The city council remains unconvinced of the value in doing it. “We haven’t had the budget constraints,” says city finance director Wyatt Kingseed. “We haven’t had the financial pressures.”
Then there’s a phenomenon that could be called the “Big Shark” syndrome. As close readers of National Geographic know, most sharks have to keep in motion constantly, in order to breathe and stay afloat. The same sort of thing is true of managing-for-results efforts. Dallas, for example, was a national leader in this field five years ago. It generated a real performance budget at a time when this wasn’t even a consideration for most other cities.
However, in the intervening years, Dallas, while still doing pretty well, lost its edge. It continued to produce a performance-based budget but has had difficulties with measures that weren’t sufficiently helpful. Now, with a new management team in place, attention is being focused on the quality and clarity of the information the city produces. “It’s time to do a good hard look at it,” says Mary Suhm, the assistant city manager. “Performance measures and strategic plans are living things. If you don’t stop every two or three years and shake them all down and get all the dust out and look again, you’re not doing what you should be doing.”
Indianapolis is one city that has kept moving steadily forward at refining its measures and making sure they work. “I look at the performance report we did in 1996, and I think ‘What were we thinking?’ says Sarah Burnham, an aide to former Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. “You’d laugh hysterically if you saw it.”
For several years, for example, the city carefully measured its performance at fixing potholes. That sounds good, and it’s an effort many cities would consider reasonable. But it turns out to be the capital-management equivalent of using the number of arrests as a measure of the criminal justice system. It’s only part of the story. Now, the city is looking at the equally important question of pothole recidivism. “We now look at repeat offenses,” says Burnham. “Are we repairing them so they don’t break up later that year?”
Inertia isn’t the only obstacle that many cities experience. The most obvious is that benchmarking, strategizing and developing good outcome measures is difficult work, no matter how you cut it. Consultants can help with the criteria, but the local government has to do a lot of the heavy lifting itself. Baltimore had a bitter experience in the early 1990s when it hired a major consulting firm to establish a performance measurement system. Agencies felt that onerous work was being imposed on them from the outside. “We were trying to tell people and push and prod and they got turned off,” says Monte Mordecai, performance measurement coordinator for the city, which has had much better success in recent years, establishing its own effort.
There are fears within any city bureaucracy that the data gathered may not be valid. Occasionally, there are genuine data scandals. New York City recently discovered that a handful of teachers were falsifying test results in order to make their schools look better. A couple of years ago, in Philadelphia, it was found that police were purposefully misreporting crime figures. A new police commissioner is focused on making sure that doesn’t happen again.
One of the biggest hurdles that cities have to jump over involves communicating performance information to citizens. Although Baltimore is establishing performance measurement as an important management tool, city leaders fear that publicizing the effort may undermine it. “Some degree of confidentiality is necessary,” officials reported, “if agencies are to take risks in setting their performance targets and if they are to honestly report bad news. A completely open process can be expected to undermine the value of the process as a management tool.”
Fear of negative attention may be overblown. Few of the cities with public performance reports have found that they attract much controversy. “Our bus-complaint rate skyrocketed,” says Burnham. “And it was obvious and nobody ever asked about that.” Even so, Indianapolis doesn’t go out of its way to broadcast its measures. “I don’t agree with restricting access, but how much heartache do you want to cause unnecessarily?” asks Burnham. “If we’re only at 80 percent of what we want to do, the citizen doesn’t know that may be four times better than we were.”
Still, many experts in this field agree that citizen buy-in and understanding is crucial to ensuring that managing-for-results programs remain afloat from one administration to the next. “I think the next real story,” says Virginia Beach’s James Spore, “is not only getting the organization to be accountable and monitor results but getting the community to understand.”
|
 |
James K. Spore, the city manager of Virginia Beach, has been managing for results for a long time. He’s come up with a maxim: “Develop an estimate of how long it’s going to take to do it,” he says, “then multiply by three.”