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.”
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