Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
August 24, 2007
As I mentioned in last week’s blog on the Citizen Survey, one of the areas of concern listed in by O’Fallon residents is whether they are getting good value for the taxes they pay. There could be many reasons for their concern, but one area that is within our control is efficiency. If we can measure the performance of City services, then we can quantitatively show where taxpayers are or are not getting good value.
Department Heads and supervisors were in training this week to kick off the City’s participation in the Center for Performance Measurement (CPM). CPM is a national program that collects and reports municipal performance data throughout the country. We are joining a consortium of 13 St. Louis area cities in the CPM so not only will we be able to collect and analyze local performance measures, but we will be able to compare our performance with other St. Louis metro cities and cities around the U.S. and Canada. We will be collecting data on Police, EMS, Parks, Code Enforcement, Information Technology, and Streets.
Measuring performance in government is hard. Private sector businesses have straightforward measures such as profits, financial returns, and share price. There are no such things in government. In business, money is both an input and an output. In government, money is only an input. Most government services are run by the government because they cannot turn a profit.
A more rigorous method is needed to determine success. While we regularly keep information on City services and closely follow our departmental budgets, we have not performed any systematic process to measure efficiency throughout the organization. Through the Center for Performance Measurement, we hope to answer these questions:
- What is high performance?
- Is the City performing better this year than last year?
- How can the City improve its performance?
- What are others doing to achieve high performance?
The simple reason to measure performance is because what gets measured gets done. We plan to incorporate the performance measures into our budget process and to make decisions on resource allocation. Then we will have more information on whether we are providing good value to O’Fallon citizens for the taxes they pay.
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