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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

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

Five Key Benefits of Enterprise Risk Management for Government

Aug 24, 2022
4 min

Five Key Benefits of Enterprise Risk Management for Government

by Marty Benison, Industry Executive Director for State and Local Government, Oracle While the move to “Software as a Service” (SaaS) started prior to the pandemic, it accelerated when citizens needed to continue to do business with governments at all levels, but now they’ have to do so remotely. This digital transformation is now ingrained in the fabric of most government organizations and is here to stay. This is good news. Moving systems to SaaS subscription models,

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

How To Use Data in Workforce Management

Jul 25, 2022
3 min

How To Use Data in Workforce Management

Across the U.S., a growing number of cities, counties, and states are using data across agencies to improve management and make decisions—and HR professionals in particular stand to gain much from this data to help drive staffing and other strategic decisions. With that in mind, we’ve written a white paper for UKG, that takes a deep dive into both the benefits and challenges of using data, with real-life examples of how it can be instrumental in building resilient HR operatio

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

Why States Need Stronger Statutes about Animal Cruelty

Jul 19, 2022
3 min

Why States Need Stronger Statutes about Animal Cruelty

by Diana Urban, former Chair of the Connecticut General Assembly Committee on Children, presently founder and president of Protecting Kids and Pets Partnership Buffalo, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, Pearl High School. Terrible tragedies and many opinions as to what went wrong. Anguished cries about red flags that were ignored, including mental health issues, early childhood trauma, social media posts, the availability (or straight up purchase) of high-powered we

A Law Ignored “To a Startling Degree”

Jul 12, 2022
2 min

A Law Ignored “To a Startling Degree”

While pensions and retiree health liabilities garner lots of headlines as dramatic fiscal threats, a less-publicized, but still critical concern is leave liability -- the amounts that are paid out for unused sick or vacation leave to departing employees. We researched and wrote about this issue in a 2021 report for UKG, called Employee Leave in the Public Sector: Current Challenges and Solutions. We're focusing on this today, thanks to a powerful new comptroller's review in N

Lessons Learned from TANF Clients

Jun 30, 2022
6 min

Lessons Learned from TANF Clients

In researching the 26-year-old Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program recently, we had the chance to talk with Mary Beth Vogel-Ferguson, a University of Utah research professor who has spent the last 23 years in a state-funded project to interview TANF clients and share results with agency management and senior leadership. “My role, which I really appreciate, has been in kind of translating what folks who are experiencing the program say and helping the people

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

Keeping the Budget Boring

May 24, 2022
4 min

Keeping the Budget Boring

by Neil Bergsman, Senior Policy Analyst at Maryland Nonprofits with a 35-year background in Maryland government finance, both executive and legislative branches. In the federal government, and in many states and localities the budget process is contentious with lots of drama. It’s exciting: red lines, brinkmanship and shut-downs. But excitement isn’t a good thing for budgeting. In Maryland, there has been plenty of contention about budget priorities, what’s in and what’s ou

Engaging the Community to Serve the Community: The Providence Rescue Plan

May 17, 2022
4 min

Engaging the Community to Serve the Community: The Providence Rescue Plan

By Joshua Avila, MPA, Deputy Chief Operating Officer, City of Providence, Office of Mayor Jorge O. Elorza I joined the City of Providence in the fall of 2019 as a Mayoral Fellow, optimistic and eager to advance a career in public administration. That initial optimism and enthusiasm quickly transitioned, however, into uncertainty and anxiety as the world drastically changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What would we do? How would we serve our constituents during a once-in

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

What Are The Best City Park Systems?

May 4, 2022
2 min

What Are The Best City Park Systems?

On May 3rd, The Trust for Public Land (TPS) released its annual ParkScore rankings of parks in the 100 most populous cities, based on five factors: Equity, Access, Acreage, Investment and Amenities. The five cities that scored highest in this ranking were Washington D.C.; St. Paul, Minnesota; Arlington, Virginia; Cincinnati, Ohio and Minneapolis, Minnesota. "Washington, DC, was rated the best big city park system in the country for the second consecutive year," according to T

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