Citistates Group

It’s easy to imagine a city, with capable executive leadership, achieving high levels of efficiency in its municipal operations. In fact, Baltimore’s making a landmark effort with its CitiStat program — the subject of my Jan. 18th column.

Plus, the CitiStat model is spreading. One advocate is Mayor David Cicilline of Providence (the activist successor to the legendary Buddy Cianci, who’s now sitting in federal prison). Providence’s version, Cicilline e-mails me, is called “ProvStat” and “we’ve received lots of help from (Baltimore Deputy Mayor Michael) Enright and his staff. It is really making a difference in our effort to re-organize our city government.”

And from Atlanta, I hear from David Edwards, program management officer for Mayor Shirley Franklin, that the city’s two-year old Atlanta Dashboard provides performance data across all city departments. ” Unlike CitiStat, we set targets for our performance and track ourselves against those targets in an entirely public forum. So not only can the public find out how many homicides or missed garbage pick ups there were, they can evaluate us against what we were aspiring to accomplish.”

But is there any way to take CitiStat’s system of tough, constantly updated reporting on departments’ performance and apply it beyond city boundaries? Clearly, a city’s efficiency is important to its economic viability: a well-run city is a place people will want to live and do business. A well-run, efficient, corruption-free region — as we advocates of citistates constantly preach — is also far more attractive and competitive.

But what about regions with their multiple governments? I asked Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, creator of Baltimore’s CitiStat. O’Malley paused and then provided a couple answers.

One was that the entire region is strengthened, in dealing with the state legislature, by a reputation of competence in the center city. “We can set the tone. We can go to Annapolis with renewed credibility based on our performance. That gives the entire metro area more esprit,” he said.

But it’s true, O’Malley added, that any regional approach “has to be more collaborative, less a hierarchical model.” There’s scant opportunity, he suggested, to regionalize such functions as police and trash. Yet there are opportunities, he believes, in such areas as homeland security, where coordination between local governments is imperative and there can be real payoff from such efforts as joint drills and tabletop exercises on how to deal with disasters.

My own thought is that regions, in an era of tight budgets and high public expectations, really need to go a lot further. There’s no reason any center city or suburban county couldn’t be first in its area to introduce tough reporting guidelines. Indeed political candidates could promise to introduce CitiStat-like standards and transparency in all the major jurisdictions — center cities as well as the major suburbs — of a metro region. The key would be to promote similar if not identical measurements, permitting cross-jurisdiction comparisons.

Admittedly, the CitiStat approach is a lot harder to imagine in regions broken up into dozens or hundreds of smaller municipalities. But just getting a region’s larger governmental units on board would be an immense step forward.

My friends in the press, always fond of knocking their local politicos, should be the lead voices, impatiently pushing for the new standards of government transparency and accountability.

And if they don’t bother or care, we should hold them accountable!