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From Governing’s
Grading the Counties introductionFebruary 2002 issue
THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
From the Publisher:
Of course, there are more than 3,000 counties in the country, ranging all the way from sprawling Los Angeles, with 10 million residents and more than $15 billion in annual revenues, to rural counties with hardly any people, to counties in New England with lots of people but no real function. We obviously could only assess a handful of them, so we divided the country into four regions and picked the counties in each with the most revenue, choosing 12 in the West, eight in the Midwest and 10 each in the South and Northeast, for a total of 40. (Believe me, that’s all we could handle.) If we hadn’t chosen the counties to survey regionally, the study would have been dominated by California, and even now it includes nine from the Golden State. With only a few exceptions, all those surveyed have annual revenues exceeding $1 billion.
If there is a standout in this group, it has to be Maricopa County, Arizona, which is among the top scorers. Not so long ago, Maricopa was a mess, on the brink of bankruptcy, almost ungovernable. Today, thanks to Administrative Officer David Smith and others, it ranks at the head of the class. At the other end of the spectrum, the negative standout is Nassau County, on New York’s Long Island. How a county with such healthy demographics and plentiful resources could fare so poorly is beyond me. Obviously, the politics of the place needs to be fixed.
As in past years, this has been a huge undertaking, involving a hefty survey, thousands of phone calls, many hundreds of interviews and the perusal of mountains of documents. Thanks to all of you in the participating counties, who put in such time and effort. And thanks to those both at the magazine and at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, our academic partners in this endeavor, who have worked so hard during the past year to produce this one issue. Their names are all listed on page 24. As in past years, special thanks to the husband-wife team of Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene, who invented this kind of reporting, and their colleague, Michele Mariani, who has joined them in presenting the results in such a compelling and interesting style.
The next time county leaders come by our office, we’ll have plenty to talk about.
Peter A. Harkness
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very so often, a small group of county officials who also serve as officers of their national association come through our office to give us an idea of what’s going on around the country and to make the case that we need to pay more attention to the county level of government. We’re often impressed by both the people and their plea, and we have listened to them about coverage; we’re paying attention.
In this issue, we really pay attention. For some time, subscribers have been asking if we planned to include counties in our annual management report cards on state and local governments, and the answer always was that we did. With this report, we finally deliver.