|
|
From Governing’s
Grading the Counties introductionFebruary 2002 issue
THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Report Card:
Fortunately, the county is better run in those areas that the manager, John Sweeten, is allowed to supervise. When he came into office a couple of years ago, he was confronted with filling a large budget gap left by his predecessor — a 20-year veteran of the job who, in his last year, had overestimated the county’s revenues significantly. Sweeten imposed a hiring freeze, enabling him to balance the budget and still have some money left over for capital facilities needs. The county’s current fiscal situation is now relatively stable.
However, cash is still scarce, and Contra Costa has lagged in bringing its information technology up to date. Its entity-wide systems get the payroll out on time and keep track of revenues but fail at making information easily accessible to managers. “Quite frankly,” says the county’s CIO, “there is no way I’m going to come up with the $1.6 billion to replace all those systems.” As an alternative, the county is making as much data as possible available on the Web and allowing managers to put it up on a Excel spreadsheet. Agencies are charged $35 per month for every individual with the capacity to go online. With some 6,500 customers, that provides the necessary cash to make the system work — without direct subsidies from the general fund.
Even where life expectancy isn’t involved, Contra Costa tends to shy away from long-range fiscal planning. Its top officials consider California state finances so unpredictable as to make detailed forecasting a waste of time. “Last year, the state was looking at a $12.5 billion surplus,” says Sweeten. “Right now, they’re looking at a shortfall.”
Positives: Strong oversight prevents overspending or misuse of funds by departments, although stringent controls sometimes limit managers’ fiscal flexibility; care taken to avoid operating deficit; surpluses used for one-time expenditures only; good activity-based cost accounting; debt management strong, although no formal written policies; new chief administrative officer seeking to provide more decision-making data to board of supervisors.
Negatives: Growing unfunded pension liability, with little action by retirement board to fill it; weak long-term forecasting, although county blames unpredictable state economy and budgeting; budget documents hard to fathom; procurement slowed by abundance of manual oversight.
Positives: Superior planning, implementing and maintenance of road projects; collaboration with University of California has kept county on cutting edge in road maintenance; only county in state to be accredited by American Public Works Association for best management practices; board increasingly supportive of preventive maintenance for facilities.
Negatives: Condition assessments on facilities are “catch as catch can”; capital improvement plan covers only two years, with minimal citizen input; maintenance routinely underfunded, leading to large backlog; insufficient attention paid to costs of future maintenance when facilities are built, although board now more focused on this issue.
Positives: Reasonably low turnover rate; county pay levels generally competitive with market rates; very strong recruiting process; online application available; good use of non-monetary rewards to high performers; efficient termination process; relatively few appeals or grievances.
Negatives: No formal countywide workforce planning; hiring takes too long, although efforts under way to collapse time frame; county continues to limit applicant pool with rules of three, five and 10; monetary rewards for high performers limited; training budget relatively low.
Positives: Departments write performance reports, which are steadily improving in quality; strategic planning done in largest departments, notably public works; active use of citizen advisory groups; management audits helpful.
Negatives: No formal countywide strategic plan; little use of outcomes, although board pushing for movement in that direction; minimal formal target-setting in reports; no evidence of strategic-planning or performance-measurement information in budget documents; performance measures not used by county officials to make day-to-day decisions.
Positives: County does superior job in managing with limited resources; strong wide-area network, supported by departmental fees; reasonably good sharing of information between departments; although county does few transactions with citizens, majority are available online; Web site portal planned to go live in early 2002.
Negatives: Entity-wide systems don’t permit easy creation of ad-hoc reports by managers; purchasing far too slow; county lacks single integrated GIS, although heading in that direction; many departments weak in evaluating benefits of new projects.
|
 |
ontra Costa County, a densely populated collection of suburbs and small industrial towns east of San Francisco Bay, is plagued by a serious problem of the sort most large American counties have solved: an unfunded pension liability that has reached $300 million and is still growing. The major source of the problem is a generous court decision in favor of the county’s deputy sheriffs, enabling them to inflate their final salaries with unused vacation time. It doesn’t help that the county’s independent retirement board does not report to the county manager and has chosen to ignore actuarial advice. The board seems not to have noticed that retired county employees are living longer than they used to.