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Dedicated to State and Local Government, State and Local Government Management, State and Local Performance Audit, State and Local Government Human Resources, State and Local Government Performance Measurement, State and Local Performance Management, State and Local Government Performance, State and Local Government Turnover, State and Local Government Data and New Governors.

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Let’s Talk Performance!

Dec 6, 2022
2 min

Let’s Talk Performance!

A couple of weeks ago, we were invited by the National Center for Public Performance to be the inaugural panelists in its series of webinars about performance management. We were fortunate enough to have Monica Croskey Chaparro, assistant city manager in Virginia Beach, Virginia with us to ask us questions, lead the conversation and add many pertinent points from her own experience. You can find the complete video under Special Videos on the home page of our website, but here

THE B&G Reading List

Nov 7, 2022
2 min

THE B&G Reading List

A couple of weeks ago, we made a request in the B&G Report for recommendations of books that would provide worthy reading for people who are interested in state and local government. We were gratified to get a number of responses (many of them having to do with cities, specifically). So, now it’s time for us to return the favor and publish nine of the titles that came in. We’ll be doing this again in the next couple of months, including many of the recommendations that came

Please Recommend a Book

Oct 27, 2022
2 min

Please Recommend a Book

We’ve recently been reading an advance copy of a book by Bill Leighty, former chief of staff under Governors Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia. It’s terrific, full of anecdotes from his many years in government service and we look forward to being able to give copies to our friends when it’s published. This has provoked a conversation between the two of us about some of the best books we’ve read that we think would be fun, instructive or thought-provoking for people in st

Fighting Fraud: Advice for Smaller Cities

Oct 18, 2022
2 min

Fighting Fraud: Advice for Smaller Cities

Whatever their size, all state and local governments must contend with the possibility that federal grant money or taxpayer revenues will be siphoned off by perpetrators of fraud. While many of the defenses against fraud are similar, there are some cautions that particularly apply to smaller communities. Recently, in an interview that appeared on Route Fifty’s October 11 “Follow the Money” broadcast, City Manager José Madrigal, talked about the effort to fight fraud in Durang

The Non-Tech Problems with Public Sector Apps

Oct 11, 2022
2 min

The Non-Tech Problems with Public Sector Apps

With the advent of mobile apps and easily accessible web portals, there’s growing potential for improved communication between governments and residents. They can also help to foster improved customer satisfaction, if residents find it easy to voice complaints, seek service improvements and get some idea how long their neighborhood is going to have to wait for that (expletive deleted) axle-twisting pothole to be fixed. That potential is diminished, however, if the app, itself

The Fight for Independent Oversight

Oct 6, 2022
3 min

The Fight for Independent Oversight

In 2018, a regional ballot measure in nine counties in the San Francisco area dedicated $500 million of $4.5 billion in increased bridge toll revenue for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to purchase new rail cars. Wisely, State Senator Steve Glazer said he wouldn’t support the expenditure if there wasn’t oversight over BART, so he put language in the bill that stated “this bill would create the Independent Office of the BART Inspector General . . .” It seems pretty clear to u

Lagging Inspections: Will We Never Learn?

Oct 5, 2022
2 min

Lagging Inspections: Will We Never Learn?

We are, as readers of the B&G Report know, regular users of performance audits. In so doing, we're sometimes reminded about the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the founder and king of Ephyra who was punished for escaping death by spending eternity rolling a boulder up a hill and then watching it roll down again. How does this connect to the problems we see in performance audits? The answer is that many of the issues we observe cropping up in one place -- and potentially resolved ther

Getting Feedback From Residents: A New Survey

Sep 29, 2022
2 min

Getting Feedback From Residents: A New Survey

Increasingly, the old days of town hall meetings is giving way to electronic means for getting input from residents. Though this means of bridging the gap between decision makers and the people they represent first became common during the pandemic it’s here to stay. With that in mind, we found a new report from PublicInput, a leader in community engagement software for government, to be of particular interest. It showed the findings of a survey conducted in May and June 2022

New, Up-to-date GUIDE TO BUDGET RESOURCES

Sep 27, 2022
1 min

New, Up-to-date GUIDE TO BUDGET RESOURCES

Several years ago, we worked with the Volcker Alliance to created a guide to resources about state budgeting intended for use by public officials, policy advocates, journalists, academics, and concerned citizens. In late September 2022, the Alliance updated the guide, which will once again provide up-to-date sources of information to provide a clear-eyed state-by-state financial outlook. You can find it by clicking here: The guide provides a clickable map, which will lead

Why hide from data?

Sep 22, 2022
3 min

Why hide from data?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been doing research into the challenges municipalities face when they want to hire a diverse workforce. One important step, it's clear, is to gather the data necessary to see how closely the demographics of the personnel in a city’s agencies – and the entity as a whole – mirror those for the city itself, and to use that information as a performance measure to guide the improvements the city is making in creating workforce diversity. Some places

Bringing Context to Quality of Life Ratings

Sep 20, 2022
1 min

Bringing Context to Quality of Life Ratings

Yesterday afternoon, at the #ICMA’s annual conference in Columbus Ohio, an announcement was made about an exciting collaboration to advance the use of data in local governments through a new partnership and data network called Government Performance Action and Learning. (GPAL). Its principal founders are #Polco, an on-line community and employee survey company and the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s think-tank, COWS. Additional partners joining GPAL will include: the Inte

Measuring Principals (not Principles)

Aug 30, 2022
2 min

Measuring Principals (not Principles)

Over the years in which we’ve been covering the evolution of performance management, it’s always been abundantly clear to us that great care needs to be taken in determining the right things to measure. We’ve long suggested that states and local governments need to consider the set of performance measures they use as a work in progress—and be prepared to refine and alter them on a regular basis. With that in mind, we were struck by a working paper, published by the Anneberg I

Praise in a Remote World

Aug 16, 2022
2 min

Praise in a Remote World

We’ve repeatedly heard the phrase: “People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.” This comment has been supported by loads of surveys over the course of time (although most of them tend to focus on the private sector, we’re confident that it’s true in governments at all levels.) The value of good supervisors has probably never been more important than it is in 2022, with states and local governments yearning for qualified candidates for a host of positions. It’s a sell

Climate Action: Backed by Budget

Aug 9, 2022
4 min

Climate Action: Backed by Budget

by Chris Fabian, CEO, ResourceX To prevent a “climate catastrophe,” the focus of local, regional, national, and international government leaders has been to keep temperature rise in check – no more than 2.0°C increase above pre-industrial levels. Last fall, the 26th annual “Conference of the Parties” (COP26) summit in Glasgow ushered in global commitments to emission reductions, like the Local Governments for Sustainability launch of Race To Zero - a global campaign

Understanding Fiscal Scandals and Their Impact on Localities

Aug 4, 2022
3 min

Understanding Fiscal Scandals and Their Impact on Localities

Toward the end of July, Route Fifty published our most recent column about the arduous task that government officials have when faced with a financial scandal. We got the idea for this column during the June conference of the Government Finance Officers Association, where we serve as advisors. A GFOA session about ethics set us off on a determined exploration of some of the common aspects of fiscal scandals that involve powerful individuals. We subsequently had long talks wit

The Tower of State and Local Babel

Aug 2, 2022
3 min

The Tower of State and Local Babel

Some years ago, when the phrase “big data,” was first gaining currency, we decided that before we embarked on any projects related to this new silver bullet, we should figure out what it meant. So, we got on the phone and spoke with a dozen smart people we knew in state and local government, asking nothing more than for a definition of that phrase. It turned out that we got at least six different variations on the theme, and there was no real clarity as to what big data reall

Disaggregating is King

Jul 21, 2022
3 min

Disaggregating is King

Our friend and colleague Harry Hatry has long insisted that data is far more valuable when it’s disaggregated. In a January 2022 paper for the Urban Institute which we were honored to co-author with him, he maintained that performance data is particularly useful when you “compare the outcome values broken out (disaggregated) by demographic characteristics (e.g., by age group, race/ethnicity, gender, education level, and location—such as neighborhood, state, or other geographi

Procurement Offices and the Environment

Jun 22, 2022
3 min

Procurement Offices and the Environment

It would be a wonderful thing, we think, if the federal government could move forward on environmental issues. But as recently as a few hours ago, the Washington Post reported that Congress is still squabbling over details of a clean energy proposal, with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia holding out on one of the key elements of the bill that much of the remainder of his party supports. We’re not going to get involved in this particular debate. But reading the Washington

Crowdfunding to Help Pay for Infrastructure

Jun 20, 2022
3 min

Crowdfunding to Help Pay for Infrastructure

by John R. Bartle, University of Nebraska at Omaha and Can Chen, Georgia State University John Bartle Can Chen Modern life cannot exist without good infrastructure. Travel, water, toilets, electricity, internet, and heating and cooling for buildings all rely on good infrastructure systems. The wealth of cities depends on public investments in infrastructure. Right now, it might seem as though there is all the money

Using Data to Build Trust in Government

May 10, 2022
4 min

Using Data to Build Trust in Government

By Doug Criscitello, Managing Director, Grant Thornton Public Sector Trust, perhaps the most important ingredient to a well-functioning society, is in very short supply these days. As the Pew Research Center regularly reports, trust in the U.S. government has generally been on a downward trajectory for decades. As pointed out in a recent survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service, we now find ourselves at a point where a majority of Americans do not trust the go

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