Friends,

Tomorrow night at the city council I am unveiling my plans for performance oriented government.  Since you are kind enough to read this blog, I thought I would give you a heads up.

Performance measures in government have been quite the rage for the past ten or 15 years, ever since the publication of “Reinventing Government.”  The theory is that by establishing performance measures, you challenge government to always improve and get more efficient.

For example, suppose you set as a performance measure that you want 75% of the potholes filled within 48 hours of the time someone calls them in.  (That, or something like it, will be a standard we will adopt.)

At the end of the year, you then measure how you did, and then try to improve and raise the bar.  Maybe your goal for the next year is to fill 90% within 48 hours.  Maybe your goal for the third year is that you have improved roadway maintenance so that the number of pothole calls have dropped.

The possibilities are endless.  In the fire department, your goal might be to respond to every working fire within 4 minutes.  In police, your goal might be to hold neighborhood meetings, or increase patrols in certain areas.  In the clerk’s office, your goal might be to have a 90% customer satisfaction rate on your customer surveys.  In highway, we will set goals that downtown streets will be swept and cleaned every week, and a goal that 300 new trees will be planted. 

Different communities do this in different ways.  In Baltimore, performance measures are in a separate computer program called “Citistat”.  Somerville and Amesbury have set up Citistat programs.

In other cities, like Cambridge, No. Andover and Chelsea, the performance goals are built into the budget of each department. 

In still other cities, like New York, department goals are posted on the web site where the city gives itself an on-line report card every year.  We are still experimenting and it is not clear which model we will eventually follow. 

The budget crisis we are undergoing is a permanent crisis, not a temporary one.  If we are going to get through this, and we will, we have to find ways to constantly improve government efficiency.  The best way to do that is by instituting government performance standards and then constantly upping the bar.

What standards would you like to see?  How can we improve?

Jim Fiorentini