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It’s Bean
Counting Time Again in Valley
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Michitson says that shared services
and costs between municipalities keys to success in 21st century |
By John Michitson
Collaboration Key to Municipal
Success in 21st century
Efficiency and value of Government
services can not be increased by simply treating government like
the private sector — such an approach ignores the basic
differences in the mission of government compared with the goals
of corporations that seek profit. However, a mindset change to
encourage collaboration may spawn innovation and creativity and
re-use of best practices in the public and private sectors, respectively,
to help move our cities and region forward.
Frankly, municipalities are stuck
in the mud, engulfed with bureaucratic mandates from the State
and outdated municipal charters. Further, the bureaucracy makes
it hard for municipalities to escape or at least migrate from
the past. Many of the critical issues, such as the burgeoning
cost of municipal retiree pensions and health insurance plans,
require complex State and/or Federal legislation to fix. This
creates an obstacle to finding a solution. Local politicians
have little incentive to attempt to collaborate across the political
spectrum to solve killer problems like pension cost explosion
because it may take years of political wrangling and lawsuits
from municipal unions to settle.
And then there is the state mandated
municipal budgeting process. Our elected officials are currently
meeting several nights a week counting beans to determine the
one-year budget for fiscal year 2007. To formulate the core of
the budget, Mayors’ tally up the number of workers, capital
outlays (e.g. new roof) and expenses (e.g. supplies) in each
department. They focus the budget on the inputs (e.g. how many
workers did we cut from last year?) Instead, they should focus
on defining the outputs of services (e.g. desired firefighter
response time to fires in each neighborhood,) then determine
the resources needed to provide the acceptable level of service.
Further, the organization of departments, the budget process
and union contract stipulations equate to a silo-based and rigid
service delivery system, exactly opposite to the global direction.
Further, while budget hearings are public, there is scant citizen
involvement because bean counts are largely meaningless to citizens,
whereas reducing time to respond to fires is tangible.
So how do we migrate to a more
meaningful and agile budgeting and service delivery approach
and re-direct the focus of elected officials to the critical
long term issues? Instead of spending so much time muddling in
20th century, bureaucratic processes, elected officials should
be more focused on critical long term issues, such as pension
and medical insurance overload when baby boomers retire, the
current brain drain occurring in the northeast due to the high
cost of living here, and the long term cost and quality of life
impacts of extensive residential development.
The first step is to develop
a collaborative mindset and evolve the silos out the door. Collaboration
is a whole lot easier with the internet and the availability
of information to the top and bottom of organizations. For example,
a modified budgeting process should reinforce and strengthen
the partnership between elected officials, the community and
city staff to provide effective local government. In addition,
a fully integrated approach to policy setting and service delivery
in a results-oriented government environment is needed. Now the
networked community will have something to talk about and debate
on a continuing basis to gain traction. An appropriate budget
process would provide the opportunity for elected officials,
citizens and staff to determine where the city is going and how
it plans to get there. A meaningful budget process helps enable
all who have a role in municipal affairs to communicate and understand
each other. The emphasis of the budgeting process should be on
making various governmental systems more rational by linking
policy setting, budgeting, and execution; integrating short-range
activities with long-range planning; and articulating service
levels and quality of services provided by government.
Now let’s extend the collaboration
concept to breaking down the silos between departments, between
cities, between cities and other government entities, between
cities and business and so on. Imagine that communities of interest
(COI) would form at the grass roots level, perhaps by email at
first, so that City Clerk office workers across the Merrimack
Valley would be networked together. Informal collaboration can
start today to share lessons learned. Now let’s extend COI
to include the State government offices that City Clerks coordinate
with. If they all form a network to collaborate, they can potentially
identify the antiquated laws/rules that govern their work, then
propose changes to lawmakers. While some of this interaction
takes place now, it usually happens on an exception basis.
Let’s take it a step further
and assume that we could evolve laws, government financial practices
and union contracts, as well as provide guidance and Mayoral
leadership, to encourage more informal collaboration between
cities on behalf of taxpayers. For example, with some loose integration
of electronic systems using web technology across the Valley
(at a cost) perhaps workers having a slow day in one city could
help inundated workers in another city. Some collaboration takes
place now (e.g. between Police departments in different cities,)
but many obstacles exist. Imagine if we could breakdown silos
and view city workers across the State as a loosely coupled engine
working collaboratively, yet informally, to improve value and
efficiency in government service delivery. And you wouldn’t
need a new top-down County government to achieve it. That’s
the old way. The new way is to enable and encourage, but not
force, collaboration; the resulting service delivery changes
that add value will flourish, the ones that don’t will drop
off.
Collaborative budgeting and service
delivery, as well as a focus on critical long term issues are
not pie in the sky approaches. There are some examples of such
innovation happening right now in Massachusetts and in the Valley.
The Boston Globe reported that the Mayor of Somerville collaborated
with a brain trust of graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government on better ways to budget and deliver services.
Somerville’s openness to change and willingness to use technology
have been cited as reasons for their success. They have implemented
a “311” telephone hotline (http://crm.4gov.net/SOMERVILLEMA/)
accessible from nearly every telephone in town, for residents
to call in for help. Instead of tracking down the Mayor, your
favorite City Councilor or the appropriate Department Head if
you need your street plowed, you call 311 and the City takes
it from there. Simple questions are answered on the spot, while
more complex issues get a case number, the status of which can
be tracked by residents on the web.
Somerville also has implemented
a comprehensive program for tracking and evaluating city service
delivery – so-called “SomerStat” program, modeled
on the CitiStat program used in Baltimore and several other major
cities. SomerStat is a computer database system that allows the
City of Somerville to regularly review every aspect of its city
government. This advance in public administration serves as a
transparent accountability and management tool through which
the city can collect and thoroughly analyze data on an array
of civic issues (e.g. crime, potholes, housing, and leaf collection.)
The performance of each city department is now checked daily
and addressed biweekly, as opposed to annually. It has led to
cost savings and faster response times, among other improvements.
Perhaps as a start, the Mayors
in the Merrimack Valley will form a Community of Interest for
weekly collaboration with the intent of inspiring ways for their
cities to help one another by connecting the dots across the
Valley.
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