THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT

Grading the Cities 2000
A Management Report Card

By Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene

Famous writers like to sum up cities in pithy phrases. ‘Chicago is a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake,’ E.M. Forster wrote. Nigel Goslin called Houston ‘six suburbs in search of a center.’ As for Los Angeles, in the words of Alistair Cooke, ‘all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air.’

Easy for them. All they needed was to come up with a few clever words to describe a huge metropolis, and they could preserve their opinion forever in books of collected quotations. They didn’t have to worry about civil service reform, capital management tracking systems, information technology architecture or rainy day funds.

We do. Indeed, the reporters, re-searchers and writers at Governing, and an army of professors and graduate students at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, have been able to think of little else for much of the past year. To us, a city is not a bundle of first impressions. It is a collection of details about the practice of urban public management.

The material in this issue — a series of 35 report cards about America’s largest city governments — is a digest of those details. It doesn’t include all the information we gathered. Given the number of criteria considered and the amount of research done, that would have been impossible in a magazine format. For each city, we present a few of the most important elements — both positive and negative — with information that we hope will educate readers, and occasionally even entertain them. The fact that Kansas City, Missouri, recruits women for city government by going to exercise centers may not be the most important fact about that city’s personnel operations, but it’s kind of neat to know.

This entire package is a companion piece to a special issue, “Grading the States,” which appeared in Governing in February of 1999. Both efforts are part of the Government Performance Project, funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. In 1997, teams of experts were brought together to develop criteria for assessing the skill with which governments handle their financial management, human resources, information technology, capital management and managing-for-results efforts. As you might expect, the criteria have been refined and improved over the course of the past couple of years. There’s nothing like a dose of reality — in the form of a vitriolic finance director or an impassioned personnel department head — to help bring standards into line with reality.

The first question any sensible reader will have, on reviewing this package of articles, is: “Why these 35?” They aren’t the top 35 in terms of population, although the list is very similar. Richmond, Virginia, is represented here, for instance, while Miami isn’t. The answer is simply that they are the 35 that had the largest total revenues, according to the most recent comparable data available when work began.

That work started late last winter, when survey instruments were mailed to all 35 of the cities. Actually, five surveys were sent — each dealing with one of our five areas of focus. The vast majority of the 35 completed the entire instrument (although there was, admittedly, a certain degree of justifiable crankiness in more than one local government, when managers saw the depth and length of the questionnaire). A small handful completed an abbreviated version of the survey.

Only two failed to send back the instrument at all. Anchorage claimed it lacked the resources to do the work. No wonder. That city has been busily involved in a fiscal civil war, which led recently to former assemblymen suing the mayor. Even so, Anchorage city officials agreed to be interviewed, and documents were provided to us. New Orleans, after hesitating for a while, ultimately turned us down flat. There, too, however, city officials cooperated with us in developing a fair evaluation of the city.

With tons of data in hand — both from the surveys and stacks of accompanying documents — Maxwell School researchers analyzed the information, coded it, computerized it and reflected on it. While that process was going on, Governing began interviewing hundreds of sources both inside and outside city government, including budget officers; managers in personnel, information technology and public works agencies; auditors; academics; legislative aides and representatives of government research groups. By combining the two processes — through a methodology that was both art and science — final grades were set for each of the 35 cities in each of the five categories.

As with the states, many cities pleaded that they were dramatically different from their brethren, and needed to be judged accordingly. In fairness, this is more true of cities than it is of states. New York City, for instance spends an amount equal to Buffalo’s annual budget twice a week. New York also runs its own schools, which many other city governments do not. Austin owns its own utility. Nashville has its own hospital. Washington, D.C., must perform many of the functions that are handled elsewhere at the state level.

But, by the same token, the questions we asked were general enough in nature to apply to all 35. Every city has a financial management process; every one has an information technology system, good or bad. In the rare instance where a specific criterion didn’t exactly apply — for example, skill at handling labor relations in cities that don’t have public employee unions — we just dropped it from consideration.

A number of interesting general observations emerged from the process. A few of the outstanding ones: