Steven Bosacker, who was former Governor Jesse Ventura's chief of staff, took over the three major initiatives in October. The job requires managing big investments in technology and coordinating services across city agencies. Customer service in Minneapolis isn't broken, Bosacker says, but cities such as Baltimore have modeled improvements with 311 and Citistat, a feet-to-the-fire accountability system for department heads. "It's about getting the biggest bang for the buck for citizens," he notes.
Bosacker has some experience with this line of work. Under Ventura, he adapted Baltimore's Citistat to a state government setting, using weekly meetings to hold commissioners accountable for their performance. Bosacker looks forward to implementing a municipal version, where he thinks results will be easier to measure. "Crime, graffiti abatement and garbage collection lend themselves to regular monitoring and management," Bosacker says. "The kinds of things a state does tend to be longer-term policy direction. It's not as easy to measure progress."
City manager John Moir, who hired Bosacker, says that having one person coordinating customer service activities will minimize bureaucratic overlap. "We have to do service delivery with less resources assigned to it," Moir says. "The key is making sure there's a common shared vision and that if people don't get it, they get it."
