Tom the meek

Part 3

by Michael Crowley

Lately, the city of Worcester has been thinking a lot about road kill. In the "dead animals" category of its budget, you will find not only the total amount spent collecting critters, but a whole formula for evaluating how well the city did the grim work:

Objective: Pick up dead animals within 4 hours of notification

Outputs: # of animals picked up

Efficiency Measure: $ per animal picked up

Internal Outcome Measure: % of dead animals picked up timely

External Outcome Measure: Customer Satisfaction as Measured by City Residents.

A little morbid, yes, but this sort of detailed information from every department will help the city make more informed decisions during its next round of budgeting about where its money is best spent.

In its quest for "customer satisfaction as measured by city residents," Worcester is not alone. This has been an exciting and promising time in city governments across the country. This summer the New Republic even likened the new group of reformist mayors to the turn-of-the-century progressives who rebelled against city hall machines and eschewed old political alliances to clean up government. Today, the reformers have embraced a set of efficiency techniques borrowed from the private sector. They use competitive bidding to control costs, and performance standards to clarify goals and increase accountability; they use outside audits to identify inefficiencies; they encourage and promote new ideas and bold thinking at all levels.

Philadelphia's Democratic mayor, Ed Rendell, turned financial chaos into a budget surplus by auditing his government and eliminating absurd union contract provisions. Chicago mayor Richard Daley, another Democrat, wrested control of Chicago's awful school system from the city bureaucracy, chopped 1700 administrative jobs from the school department, and erased a projected $1.2 billion deficit. Indianapolis's Republican mayor, Stephen Goldsmith, streamlined furiously and invested huge savings in the city's poorest areas. Together, these and other mayors -- including Cleveland's Michael White, Milwaukee's John Norquist, and Los Angeles's Richard Riordan -- have joined forces to propagate their ideas. This month, a group of them are founding a think tank in New York, the Center for Civic Innovation.

The reformers' common theme -- derived largely from Al Gore's beloved manifesto Reinventing Government -- is that government should run more like a business; that market pressures (though not outright privatization) can turn government's monopolistic flab into buff muscle.

Indianapolis's Goldsmith, the high priest of this new policy church, is one of the few mayors to challenge the status quo without a fiscal crisis as an excuse. A technocrat with Midwestern-choirboy looks, he took office in 1992 and promptly hired a national accounting firm to determine the cost-effectiveness of each function of government -- paving roads, for example, or repairing buses. Next, he applied his Yellow Pages test: if he could open the phone book and find a private company that also paved roads or repaired buses, then city employees were forced to compete with that company for the city's contract. (The accounting firm's audit served as a guide.)

City agencies responded with dramatic ideas for streamlining and cutting costs. When the city took bids on street repair services, for instance, public workers won the contract by figuring out how to do the work with one truck instead of two, with five workers instead of eight, and with 18 fewer middle managers.

Goldsmith says this brand of competition has made city services 35 to 40 percent cheaper, cut the city payroll by a third, and saved Indianapolis about $150 million per year.

And such savings need not involve wanton layoffs or union-bashing. Ideally, city workers win in competitive bidding, and they often receive City Hall's help in preparing their bids. Goldsmith fired few union workers to trim the payroll, relying instead on retirements and transfers. In some cases, city workers have won bonuses for locating savings.

In Indianapolis and other cities (notably Milwaukee), there's another major innovation behind these achievements: performance measurement, a practice becoming so widespread that Governing magazine recently described it as a "public administration juggernaut."

In old-fashioned city government, officials had little incentive to budget carefully, and therefore had only a vague idea how dollars were being spent and how well agencies were performing. A city might know how much was being spent on a particular department, but it would often take a breakdown -- say, a high-profile failure to plow the roads -- to reveal how little citizens were getting for the money.

Now cities like Worcester are, in policy jargon, "measuring outcomes instead of inputs." Performance measures force cities to set up detailed objectives and standards, and then hold department heads accountable. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but after getting nine more inches of snow than Boston in that April blizzard, Worcester was able to plow all its roads in a single day.

From the way Tom Menino talks, one might be forgiven for thinking he is also a leader in this field: "Over the past four years, City Government has been substantially redesigned to encourage results and outcomes, and to provide Boston residents with high quality, cost-effective service," proclaimed his 1998 city budget proposal.

But government has hardly been "substantially redesigned." Although the "urban mechanic" says he is obsessed with basic services, Menino has not done everything possible to make them more efficient and effective. In terms of reform, Menino has at best been tinkering.

Give the mayor his due: no one disputes that he has been a competent manager. Among other things, the city's credit rating is now at a record high. Even Sam Tyler, executive director of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, who has been critical of Menino's pace on innovation, cites the mayor's success in beginning to reform the city's schools by wrangling with the teachers' unions, fighting to preserve an elected school board, and appointing Thomas Payzant as schools superintendent. And Menino has overseen a police department whose innovations have won national recognition.

But on that score, most observers credit not Menino but police commissioner Paul Evans. And Menino has shown little enthusiasm for innovation elsewhere.

Take competitive bidding. "To ensure that the best system exists" for towing stolen vehicles, declared Menino's 1996 budget proposal, the city would open the service (handled at the time by the police) to competitive bidding -- a first for Boston. Instead, the duties were quietly turned over to the city's transportation department. And after an independent audit last winter revealed shoddy work by the city's school custodians, Menino reportedly considered competitive bidding on those contracts. Again, nothing happened.

Then there are the city's performance measures. "The bricks and mortar" of efficiency, says the '98 budget proposal, "are the budgeting and performance goals system implemented to develop the FY98 operating budget." Sounds nice, but people familiar with the city budget say that -- although Boston actually began developing performance measures in 1986 -- they have had little impact. Why? Lack of support from Menino and his predecessors.

"It's all been done very quietly," says Tyler, "and I can't say that it has become a real factor in evaluation of department heads or decision-making in guiding resources."

One former City Hall official says that while some department heads have come up with excellent standards, others have negotiated ones "that they could achieve with two hands tied behind their back." And, adds Tyler, "As far as I can tell [the reports] just sits on peoples' shelves." Since standards are meant to be a guide for budgeting decisions, that makes them worthless.

As for an independent assessment of the costs of city services, Menino's '98 budget tells the story: "The implementation of a new unit costing methodology to better understand the costs of services did not occur in the past year" and "is on hold."

Menino bristles at the charge that he hasn't been innovative, and points to a list of minor reforms, like the private contracting of city housing developments for the elderly, new Saturday hours for the Boston Public Library, and the cabinet structure he established to coordinate the city's sprawling agencies.

"Those things people don't talk about, for some reason," he says.

Menino also says it's unfair to measure Boston against other cities. "They're different situations," he says. "Ed Rendell took over with a $100 million deficit. Goldsmith's doing something, but it's not a pro-labor city. Boston's a different situation, and you govern as these situations need be."

But Menino doesn't offer good explanations for why he has failed to pursue ideas in which he's shown a clear interest. Of competitive bidding, he says only "we're interested in that," and he doesn't directly refute the charge that performance standards here are inadequate.

He's been inconsistent on other promising ideas, too. Menino cited the growth of pilot schools in Boston, for instance, as evidence of his innovative record. But in a bitter dispute this summer, he sided with residents in the high-voter-turnout neighborhood of West Roxbury who oppose an expansion of the widely acclaimed Lyndon Pilot School there.

Finally, although in 1994 Menino excitedly announced the development of "empowerment zones" to draw businesses to the city's poorer neighborhoods, he's made little effort to actually award the millions in federal tax breaks and loans needed to make the plan work.

There is a larger pattern here. Not only has Menino failed to nurture innovation, but he has also been reluctant to pursue specific cost-saving ideas. For example, after a 1995 city-ordered independent audit of the fire department recommended $3.8 million in savings, Menino sought cuts of just $1 million. The audit recommended cutting 72 firefighters; Menino added 99 new ones.

And consider the case of the "alarm boxes," the fire department's streetside emergency phones. They cost nearly $2 million per year to maintain, but today they are obsolete, and used mainly for mischief. The audit recommended eliminating the phones. The phones have gone untouched.

One former City Hall official familiar with the budget process argues that these situations pose a difficult dilemma for the mayor. The short-term risks of streamlining are often hard to swallow for long-term, barely noticeable savings.

"The first person that dies because there isn't an alarm box is on your shoulders," he says. "And what about the 20 or 30 guys who maintain the boxes? You're gonna fire them? You're gonna take on the most beloved union in the city? And what, at the end of the day are you gonna say? The mayor looks at that and says, `Life's too short.' "

It is true that Menino faces deeply entrenched opposition to change. As Alan Altshuler, a professor of urban policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, puts it, "Boston is probably as resistant a culture as you would find anywhere in the country."

Part of that has to do with a continued tradition of patronage. "There is a real culture in Boston where government is supposed to help people," says Tyler, "and part of the elected official's job is to find jobs for people who need help. That's changed quite a bit from the earlier days, but it hasn't gone away. It's as if they're expected to be an employment agency as well as provide services."

But much of the resistance come from the strength of municipal unions, one of the most powerful and intractable forces in Boston politics. The unions are well-organized and, in a city of paltry voter turnout, their members can have a huge impact on mayoral and city council elections.

Strong municipal unions are not in themselves a bad thing. But the combination of union muscle and civil service protection often doesn't work in the public's interest.

"It makes change very, very difficult when you have to bargain [with unions] over issues like giving time off to wash hands," says Bob Ciolek, a former chief operating officer under Menino. The patrolmens' union, for instance, is demanding a contract change that Commissioner Paul Evans says would have made a reform triumph like community policing impossible.

And for an idea of how unions might respond to a perceived threat like competitive bidding, just look at the stinging backlash against Bill Weld's privatization drive. Those PRIVATIZATION: A WELD SCAM stickers can still be found all over the city. Would the distinction between privatization and competition survive a war of slogans and sound bites?

"City workers of all kinds have scared everybody else out of the game," says Chris Lydon.

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Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.