Search Results

We both really like listening to podcasts and even though we don’t have nearly the time to tune into all the ones we enjoy, we’re always on the lookout for good recommendations for those that add context and conversation to our work about government. (Though our favorite doesn’t fall in that category. It’s Alan Alda’s Clear & Vivid. It occurred to us that perhaps you are also seeking some good recommendations of podcasts that overlap with your interests in all things state, local and federal. Here are a few. (And, we’d welcome more good ones to listen to ourselves and share with our readers). The Academic Minute. A very short take on a topic of note to academics, explained in understandable and lay terms that give a brief sense of the topic. On Mondays, there’s a preview of what’s coming that week. Last week, the show featured a handful of talks from Portland State University, including one about tiny houses as a way to help the difficult homelessness problem and one that focused on an evaluation on non-police response to 911 calls that don’t involve criminal activity. Andy Feldman’s GovInnovator Podcast. Last week we listened to GovInnovator’s 200th podcast, an interview with Naomi Goldstein, deputy assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the nobility of evaluation, courage, “constantly changing bureaucratic constraints,” leadership and reconciling personal views with changing political priorities. Other March podcasts featured Sara Dube, director of the Results First Initiative at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and two that focused on the Promise Programs, and the bipartisan appeal of tuition-free college programs. The Ethical Life Podcast. This features interviews on different topics that focus on the interplay between modern life and ethics, and while they’re not strictly about government, they often overlap with public policy topics. The podcast features conversations with Dr. Richard Kyte, director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin, The one we listened to yesterday focused on how much attention one should pay to what a leader’s family members are doing. Mathematica’s On the Evidence. This is hosted by the talented J.B. Wogan, with whom we used to work at Governing. Podcasts appear every two weeks on Wednesdays. As the title of the podcast suggests, themes are generally evidence, evaluation and data focused. One March podcast centered on community wastewater testing. One in February looked at the role of evidence in state and local spending of federal pandemic relief funds. (A couple of years ago, we were honored to be chosen by J.B. to be podcast guests, talking about the ways states blend performance measurement and evaluation. It was fun to be on the other side of the microphone. #StateandLocalGovernment #PodcastRecommendation #StateandLocalGovernmentPodcasts #BarrettandGreeneRecommendations #BandGReportRecommendations #PerformanceMeasurement #HumanServices #EthicalLifePodcast #AcademicMinute #AndyFeldmansGovInnovatorPodcast #MathematicasOnTheEvidence #JBWogan #GovernmentEthics #DBReinhartInstituteforEthicsinLeadership #CommunityWastewaterTesting #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement #PublicSectorPerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalPandemicReliefSpending #DrRichardKyte #SaraDube #ResultsFirstInitiative #NaomiGoldstein

On the morning of April 1, 2022, the New York Times gleefully reported this very long sentence about the happy news from the Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report. “A continued torrent of consumer demand, paired with an emerging atmosphere of normalcy as coronavirus caseloads and health restrictions fade away, led to a burst of new jobs last month, giving reason for optimism despite the year’s increasingly uncertain economic outlook.” The Times piece didn’t, however, address itself to jobs in state and local government which we anticipated would be somewhat different. So, this morning we turned to Joshua Franzel, Managing Director of MissionSquare Research Institute, formerly the Center for State and Local Government Excellence at ICMA-RC. Franzel, a leading authority on government job statistics, helped fill us in on that part of the picture. Here are the highlights from our conversation with him (which took place about an hour before we posted this B&G Report). “When you step back and look at the point when the public health emergency was declared and then look at today’s numbers that were released from March, overall, the state and local employment levels are still down 3.6 percent. That equates to about 729,000 jobs.” "From a state and local perspective, it really is a mixed picture. You see with the new March numbers that came out this morning that state government employment actually is trending downward. It followed a recent peak in February 2020, right before the pandemic started. It began to recover and then peaked once more in June of 2021. But since June of 2021, it’s continued to trend downward.” “On the local side the news is a bit better in terms of the overall number of local government positions. They continue to increase, though they’re still not anywhere close to where they had peaked in February of 2020. But when you peel back the layers of the onion, a lot of that increase was from local education, where the positions needed to be filled. But when you exclude education, those positions are on a downward trend. This includes transportation and hospitals.” We need to focus on the quit rate which has been consistently high. Retirements were at a 20 year high in the summer of 2020 and they have continued to be almost twice the typical rates since then, even though you are seeing a growing number of efforts in state and local governments to increase compensation, a topic I read about in your piece in Route Fifty this morning. Most governments now are in a very optimal position to provide either one-time increases or longer-term increases.” (As to the future), “I think overall there’s really no way to predict it. States and localities are still facing positions that need to be filled to provide essential services, and I do think these efforts will continue to bear fruit. But we’re also dealing with demographic changes of an aging population and we’re going to see an uptick in retirements which just puts more pressure on employers of all sizes and sectors to try even harder to recruit talent into the workforces.” #PerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernment #PublicSectorHumanResources #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #PublicSectorWorkforce #MissionSquareResearchInstitue #JoshuaFranzel #StateandLocalGovernmentStaffingCrisis #StateandLocalGovernmentJobsDecline #GovernmentQuitRate #StateandlocalGovernmentTurnover #PublicSectorTurnover #PublicSectorStaffCapacity #FederalJobsReport #GovernmentJobStatistics

When states invest money, whether for their pension plans or other purposes, to what extent is it sensible for them to trade potentially better returns on their money in exchange for other benefits, including social good or economic development? We’ve heard arguments on both sides of this discussion and have come to the conclusion that there may be no simple answers, and that this question may likely best be considered on a case-by-case basis. We first began to think about this issue in the early 1990s, when we had a discussion about this with Ed Schafer, the governor of North Dakota, the only state that owns its own bank, which is used as a repository for the state’s investments. We suggested to him, at the time, that perhaps the state could get higher returns on its cash with other venues for investment. His response was that, even if this was the case, the ability of North Dakota to make sure its farmers were able to borrow at affordable rates, through the state’s bank, more than offset any potential diminution of return. The governor’s long-ago sentiments were buttressed recently by an article written by Robert Chirinko, a Professor in the Department of Finance at University of Illinois at Chicago for the Government Finance Research Center there. That conversation emerged from the depths of our memories just last weekend, when the Anchorage Daily News ran an editorial about the Alaska Permanent Fund’s in-state investment program, which, according to the editorial, “carves out $200 million for private equity investments in businesses with Alaska ties.” The editorial complained that this was bad policy for several reasons the first of which was that “The Permanent Fund’s mission is maximizing returns above almost all other considerations.” In addition, the editorial stated that “The Permanent Fund wasn’t established to be an economic development agency.” After reading that editorial, we did a little Internet searching to see what had been written about the biggest cash hoard many states have available for investment, pension funds. There’s been a trend in places like California to turn to so-called ESG investing *for environmental, social and governance.” A well-researched piece, released in October 2020, by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, came to the conclusion that running investment plans with an eye on the environment or social benefits “does not appear to be costless—plans earn less in returns and fail to capture beneficiaries’ interests.” So, without enough independent research for us to form an opinion on this issue, we turned to a Government Accountability Office report from 2018, which stated that; “Fiduciaries may have difficulty determining appropriate issues to consider in investment management involving ESG factors. Fiduciaries that decide to pursue using ESG factors may face difficulty identifying and evaluating available options. Lastly, without additional information plans may be reluctant to pursue ESG strategies because they do not understand risks that could be considered material and they may not be able to effectively select and monitor an ESG strategy.” As we do more research about this topic, we invite readers of the B&G Report to send us their opinions and comments at greenebarrett@gmail.com. #StateBanks #StateofNorthDakota #PublicSectorInvestmentManagement #PublicSectorInvestment #GovernmentFinanceResearchCenter #StateandLocalGovernment #ESGInvesting #StateofAlaska #AlaskaInStateInvestmentProgram #EdSchafer #RobertChirinko #StateofCalifornia #CenterforRetirementResearch #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceManagement

The Michigan Office of the Auditor General (OAG) recently came out with a scathing performance audit about the state’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP) programs. With some 2.8 million people in the state enrolled in Medicaid and another 237,500 in CHIP, this is a matter of serious concern, not just to recipients but to Michigan residents who don’t want their tax money wasted. But beyond the actual audit findings, we found the back and forth between the agency responsible for these payments, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), and the Auditor General to be of interest. In our experience it’s relatively rare for this kind of back and forth to find its way into newspapers. But in this case, the headline of an article about the audit in the Detroit News read: “Audit flags $2.4B in ‘improper’ Medicaid, CHIP payments; Michigan cries foul.” We must admit to having a little problem with the wording of the headline, which seems to indicate that the Auditor General isn’t just as much a part of Michigan government as one of the executive branch agencies. But that’s just a quibble. We took a close look at the report and thought you’d find the back and forth between the two – transparently displayed in the audit – to be of interest. We’ll focus on one of the findings. In its effort to assess the effectiveness of the “efforts to complete accurate Medicaid and CHIP client eligibilty determinations,” the auditor found that there were “inaccurate eligibility determinations and failure to maintain documentation resulting in estimated improper payments of $2.3 billion and $89.5 million for Medicaid and CHIP, respectively.” With $14.7 billion in direct Medicaid payments in fiscal year 2019, that means that about one out of six of those dollars was paid out improperly. But MDHHS, didn’t like this finding. As its response was stated in the audit report, “MDHHS strongly disagrees that the estimated improper payments are an accurate depiction of payments in error.” The agency indicated that it had requested an audit conference to discuss this disagreement, during which time it provided additional background and details. “Given the complexity of Medicaid eligibility, MDHHS took this additional step to partner with the OAG to help educate them on state and federal policy, operations and technology and resolve concerns with incorrect audit findings to ensure an accurate and representative audit product.” This complaint didn’t seem to faze the OAG much, and it defended its background and knowledge and capacity to understand the complexities of the Medicaid program. It wrote that “Our professional audit staff has decades of experience auditing the Medicaid program via mandated federal single audits (required since the mid 1980s) and various performance audits.” It then went on to address the specifics of MDHHS’s issue, writing that “Late during this audit, MDHHS brought new concerns to the OAG which were discussed in the audit conference, a process the OAG affords to all auditees. We removed 4 exceptions from the findings. THE OAG did not remove the remaining exceptions requested by MDHHS because the department could not provide sufficient evidence . . . “ The pages of the audit report are a study in how this kind of disagreement can be veiled in words that are the model of politeness but reveal a thorough lack of genuine consensus about pretty much anything. The agency’s overall comment included this: “MDHHS is always looking for opportunities to improve its programs and how they are operated. . . The efforts we have underway to improve this program and its activities are not necessarily a direct result of audit activity and does not mean that MDHHS agrees with all components of a finding. MDHHS can disagree with the OAG’s methodology, interpretations of policy and determinations on particular cases, without conceding our commitment to continuous improvement.” The OAG’s response: “Regardless of whether MDHHS’s efforts to improve processes or implement corrective actions are a direct result of our audit, it does not negate our responsibilities to communicate reportable issues. The department’s actions further support this weakness exists and that the finding ws warranted. Therefore, the finding stands as written.” #PerformanceAudit #StateOfMichigan #Medicaid #CHIP #HumanServices #EligibilityManagement #AuditorAgencyRelations #MichiganAuditorGeneral #StateandLocalPerformanceAudit #MichiganMedicaidAudit #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #PerformanceAuditConflict #MedicaidAudit #AuditorAgencyConflict

We often talk about performance auditors on this website. These dedicated professionals may be appointed or elected. They use well-accepted auditing standards to assess risks, uncover management problems and gauge how well programs perform, providing valuable insight and oversight throughout the country. Then there’s California. In addition to the traditional kind of performance auditing, which takes place in many of the state’s cities, and counties, it also has an unusual approach to local oversight that makes use of about 1,100 citizens each year to provide assessments of how programs operate. It’s called the California Civil Grand Jury system. In each of the state’s 58 counties, jurors serve a one-year term, map out plans for the topics they want to tackle and then plunge in. About 900 reports are produced each year. Recent topics have included the monitoring of idle oil wells in Santa Barbara County; efforts to increase affordable housing in Santa Clara County, and the homeless animal problem in Contra Costa County. Details about the reports – as well as official reaction to them -- are available through “California Grand Jury News, “ a blog that’s published by the California Grand Jurors’ Association. If you want to find more, there’s a new 50-page e-book, which the association wrote about in a blog post yesterday (March 20th). This is a powerful example of citizens participating in their governments that’s unlike that found most anyplace else. If you live in California, by the way, the association is very eager to increase the pool of qualified jurors. From the e-book: “Qualifications for serving as a grand juror are simple: The applicant must be a citizen of the United States: 18 years or older; a resident of the county for one year immediately prior to being selected; in possession of their natural faculties; of ordinary intelligence, sound judgement and fair character and possessed of sufficient knowledge of the English language.” (Note that we also wrote about California’s Civil Grand Jury in a blog post about five years ago, which you can see here. ) #PerformanceAudit #CitizenParticpation #CaliforniaOversight #CaliforniaCounties #GovernmentOversight #GovernmentAccountability #CaliforniaGrandJurorsAssociation #CaliforniaGrandJuryNews #CaliforniaCivilGrandJury #CitizenInput

Performance auditors frequently do a very good job at holding agencies in their states, cities and counties accountable, by doing careful analysis and frequently making recommendations. But how many of those recommendations are actually implemented, and how many wind up as nothing more than well-intentioned suggestions (rather like the New Year's resolutions people make to lose 30 pounds in the next year)? Many entities do reviews of recommendations and the city of Portland, Oregon has just done a notable job of comparing how agencies responded to recommendations made by City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero through 2021. We want to congratulate the auditor's office for doing this review -- and making it totally transparent by sending it out to people like us! According to a release that accompanies the report, "Recommendations from a 2018 audit of Parks and Recreation’s scholarships have yet to be implemented, and the Police Bureau is still working on half of the 10 recommendations we made to improve overtime management in 2019." There was good news as well. For example the report's summary points to "Human Resources and Technology Services [which] topped the list of percentage of recommendations implemented with 86 and 67 percent." “Carrying out audit recommendations is essential for improving how Portland works,” Hull Caballero said in the release. “Portlanders are best served when managers implement our recommendations to make their programs and operations more efficient, effective, and equitable." Here are the actual results, as shown in the auditor's follow up of audit status report, which can be found at: https://www.portland.gov/audit-services/annual-follow-status-reports#toc-summary #AuditRecommendations #AuditRecommendationImplementation #PortlandAudit #PortlandAuditRecommendations #GovernmentAccountability #GovernmentOversight #CityAudit #PerformanceAudit #CityPerformanceAudit #PerformanceAuditDashboard

As we say on the home page of this website, we are "dedicated to state and local government." Notwithstanding that, we feel awkward about going about our day-to-day work as though the world was in a "business-as-usual" mode. It's not. We at Barrett and Greene, Inc (which is to say Katherine and Rich) want to speak from our hearts, and say -- like millions of others have said: "Our hopes and wishes go to the valiant people of Ukraine. May they soon know peace and freedom." Credit: Adam Young (Canadian/contemporary) Hearts for Ukraine, 2022 Acrylic on wood 24 x 24 inches Private collection

It often feels as though the Holy Grail of government management is to have some process or procedure written into statute. That’s the only way, the presumption goes, to be sure that a new management idea is actually implemented and, presumably, supported with cash. In fact, over the decades of observing the ebb and flow of management efforts in state and local governments, we’ve seen that often the ethos or culture of an organization is just as important as the statutes it puts on the books. One example that immediately comes to mind is Vermont. That state is often singled out as the only one of the fifty that doesn’t have a legal requirement for a balanced budget. But that doesn’t matter. As the Volcker Alliance indicated in a report we wrote, “Statutes or constitutional requirements in forty-nine states mandate that budgets must be balanced, while Vermont does so by long-standing tradition.” By contrast, take a look at some of the statutes that have required various kinds of performance management efforts. In a 2018 book by Elaine Yi Lu, and Katherine Willoughby they found that forty two states had some kind of performance budgeting in statute. Based on our own experience, we’re aware that far more than eight states have had no real apparatus in place for using performance budgeting in a real way, and the statutes in some are little more than words on paper, signifying little in the real world. Willoughby and Yi Lu put the matter into more deliberate terms, writing that “the lack of a performance budgeting law “does not preclude use of performance budgeting, and the existence of a budget law does “not “necessarily lead to strong practices.” Back some years ago, when we were working on the Government Performance Project, an effort funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to measure the management capacity of the fifty states, we pointed to the power of a pro-management ethos in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The person in the governor’s seat in that state cannot run for re-election immediately after a four-year term (though the governor can run for non-consecutive terms). Yet, despite every four year changes in this powerful position, Virginia’s capacity to manage wisely continued through most administrations, despite an occasional hitch. Many of the ways in which Virginia did particularly well in those years were not written into any form of statute, though. For example, in the last iteration of the GPP reports, which came out in 2008, Virginia was given an A in the category that focused on human resources. Part of the reason for this was that it was a pioneer in integrating human resource knowledge transfer. No statute forced the state to do that. But it did, to the state’s benefit. All this, however, doesn’t mean that a state’s ethos can’t change over time. Back when we were working on a project similar to the GPP for the now-defunct publication, Financial World, New Mexico was the very last of the fifty states to agree with the idea that performance management could be a benefit. (You won’t find this online, as Financial World isn’t just defunct, it’s pretty much invisible, but we well recall New Mexico leaders telling us that they weren’t interested in pursuing that path in the early 1990s). Today, however, that has changed dramatically, and the state is now a national leader in this critically important management tool. In fact, the Center for Accountability and Performance at the American Society for Public Administration has just given the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, its prestigious “Organizational Leadership Award.” And that’s one way in which ethos and statute have a great deal in common. They can both change. The fundamental difference is that statutes can change at the whim of a legislature, while ethos tends to be more difficult to change – for better or worse. #GovernmentManagement #GovernmentPerformance #Performance #StateandLocalGovernment #GovernmentPerformanceProject #PewCharitableTrusts #KatherineWilloughby #ElaineLiYu #VolckerAlliance #NewMexico #Virginia

In the many performance audits we read each year, a common recurring problem is staff capacity. While this isn’t a new issue, we're confident that it will get increasing attention in coming months – an outgrowth of the nearly universal problem that state and local government entities currently have with escalating turnover and declining job applications (two topics we’ve recently written about for Route Fifty). Understaffing is one frequently cited reason for tardy reports or missed deadlines. Not surprisingly, in the last couple of years, it has also been a significant factor in audits about overtime. In addition, inexperienced or absent staff can be cited as the reason for financial errors. Since understaffing is so often the cause of a host of problems, we jumped at the chance to read a recent audit that focused specifically on this issue -- not just its ramifications. This document, which we think is useful for state and local agency leaders around the country -- and their HR offices -- was produced by the Atlanta Auditor in a February 2022 performance audit about “Facilities Management Staffing and Scheduling” in Atlanta’s Department of Aviation. While a lack of attention to staffing can have all kinds of negative effects, the problems in this audit are particularly significant since, as the auditors wrote, "Adequate staffing and scheduling in the Facilities Management division is vital to airport operations and safety.” The Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, owned by the City of Atlanta, is one of the world’s busiest. One worrisome piece of data: 17% of technical staff did not have required licenses or certifications. Many of the findings – and recommendations -- in the audit related to data systems that were improving, but were still diffuse, sometimes paper-based, often inconsistently used, and plagued with missing data. Close to 17% of data fields were blank and only 65% of work orders included start dates and finish dates. While noting the difficulties of comparing airports, due to different methods of measurement and the issues that come with self-reported statistics, the audit noted that Atlanta had a passenger to staff ratio “four times higher than the median”, based on six large airports that auditors contacted for comparison. The city data problems hampered management’s ability to make decisions about staff or schedules. “Facilities Management’s workload information is incomplete and inaccurate,” auditors wrote. The result? “Division management cannot analyze and determine resource needs.” Another problem was the absence of a salary and compensation study to provide documented evidence that salaries were uncompetitive with the market, a problem that hobbles the division’s efforts to fill positions. Uncompetitive city pay “has affected the department’s ability to hire technical staff, such as electricians,” auditors wrote. In fact, 30% of the electrician positions in February 2021 were vacant. #PerformanceAudit #Performance #Hiring #HumanResources #Staffing #Understaffing #Data #CityGovernmentVacancies #FacilityStaffing #PublicSectorStaffCapacity #CityStaffCapacity #PublicSectorHumanResources #CityHumanResources #AtlantaAuditor #AtlantaHumanResources

As anyone who is following our website knows, we write for a great many other publications and organizations, including Route Fifty, the Government Finance Research Center, the Government Finance Review, the IBM Center for the Business of Government and more. We’ve been privileged to have a fair amount of latitude in the topics we cover for these outlets, but we’d never get away with writing a piece that has the title this blog item does. Truth is that every few days, in the course of our work, one of us complains to the other one about something annoying that has come up in dealing with states and localities or organizations that work with states and localities. Our daughter, Sandy, sometimes jokingly uses the word “rant,” for a verbal tirade she’s about to launch about something. So, what follows is our rant about some of the issues that aren’t hugely important but are really bothersome. We’re pretty sure we’re not alone in the world of researchers, analysts and reporters in our frustration with the following common nuisances. With that in mind, we hope readers will understand that we’d like it if some of what follows provides some insights that will help people get their messages across without frustrating the messengers. 1) With some frequency, we come across a wonderful looking report, which we think can help us understand a topic more thoroughly – and potentially be of use in a column or article we’re writing. But then we go in search of the date of publication, and it’s no place to be found. It’s important to us that the facts and figures we use are timely. We just don’t understand why people don’t put dates on things. 2) We send out so many e-mails that it could make your head spin. Frequently, they’re requests to people for information or for a telephone conversation. We understand that the people we’re contacting are generally very busy. We really do get that. But we can’t understand why so many folks don’t take thirty seconds to write back and say, “I got your e-mail, but I won’t be able to get back to you until Thursday (or Friday, or never).” That would help save us from bothering people by re-sending the same e-mail two or three times. 3) While we’re talking about e-mails, we wish that people understood the frustration of email miscommunication. Many people write e-mails quickly, without a sense of subtlety. We’ve witnessed more than one misunderstanding (not necessarily involving us) that emanates from a terse e-mail that inadvertently leaves improper impressions. Our rule: If it’s taking too long to write an e-mail, because we need to make a subtle point, we pick up the phone. 4) Back to documents. When reports are sent to us in PDF format, we can’t manipulate the data, with any ease. PDFs may look prettier, but they’re somewhat less useful than other data-friendly forms. 5) In the old days, when we had most of our communications through good old-fashioned telephones, it wasn’t a big deal if someone was delayed and kept us waiting for ten or fifteen minutes. If anything, we could get lots done in those little nuggets of time. But now that so many conversations are being held on Zoom or some other visual platform, and the other party is late, we find ourselves sitting in front of a screen, staring at our own faces. 6) It would be great if people who are asking us for help (which we’re generally happy to give) spelled our names properly. This may seem petty. But we can’t help but assume that if someone can’t bother to know that Katherine is spelled that way, not “Catherine,” or “Kathryn,” perhaps they’re not sincerely interested in getting our help. We’re also not altogether fond of having a note sent to us as “Dear Greene,” or “Dear Barrett”. We assume those names are used for us when the note is computer generated, which doesn’t make us excited about responding. 7) Like many others, we’ve grown increasingly dependent on websites in order to find the appropriate person to speak with about something. Frequently, we can find the name of a likely source. But how to reach them? Missing contact information is a constant frustration. No useful phone numbers are anyplace to be found. Sometimes there’s a general number, but those lead to menu upon menu upon menu, ultimately leading no place worthwhile. We’d settle for an e-mail address. But they, too, are often missing in action.

by Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress and author of The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s paper “The Empty House Next Door.” There are millions of abandoned properties in America, and they’re a symptom of an economy and a housing market which is comfortable with the idea of leaving large parts of America behind. They are mostly found in the hearts of older cities, like Cleveland or Detroit, or in rural areas, like Appalachia or the Plains states. ​ As I wrote in my book, “The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America,” at the same time as some areas in cities like St. Louis or Chicago are gentrifying, in far more areas struggling working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, are falling behind. As a result, in the last two decades, more and more abandoned properties have begun to pop up in not only in older cities, but often in many of the inner-ring 1950s suburbs that surround them. ​ There are sections of American cities where the majority of parcels are either vacant buildings or vacant lots, a condition I’ve termed hypervacancy. ​ Though properties that owners have literally walked away from are common in those areas, most are invisible to people who live in other parts of the country. They are a powerful symbol of the economic, racial, and spatial polarization of 21st century America. ​ Abandoned properties are not just harmless eyesores. While they are not the cause of the problems facing distressed urban neighborhoods or rural towns, they make those areas’ problems worse. They reduce the value of neighboring properties, increase the risk of crime and fires, and perhaps most of all, foster a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that a neighborhood is beyond repair, and the only thing to do – if you can afford to – is to get out. ​ In areas where there are still far more occupied houses than abandoned ones, and where there’s demand, it makes sense to try to get the properties fixed up and restored to productive use. ​ The city of Baltimore came up with a great program they called Vacants to Value. Leaders there picked areas in the city – mostly struggling working-class neighborhoods – where small contractors and developers were willing to use their own money to fix up abandoned properties, and where the city made sure that they got properties to rehabilitate. That program has stabilized many neighborhoods in Baltimore that might otherwise have gone under. ​ The problems of abandoned properties in many places are made more difficult to deal with by legal systems like tax foreclosure, state laws that tie municipalities’ hands in dealing with abandoned properties, or local government neglect. These challenges can result in properties sitting empty and in legal limbo until they are beyond repair. By the time the city or a nonprofit can get control of these properties, they have usually been vandalized, stripped of copper pipes and lack working plumbing, heating or electricity. They are expensive to restore, and there’s little money available to deal with more than a handful of them. In some cases, there’s little to do except demolish them. ​ Demolition got a boost about ten years ago, when the Obama administration allowed states to redirect money from what was called the Hardest Hit Fund – a program set up to help states deal with unsalvageable, foreclosed properties by tearing them down. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland made progress by demolishing thousands of abandoned properties. But the money ran out as the Obama administration ended. ​ Demolition is an expensive proposition, and even when affordable, there’s still a next step. What to do with the vacant lots that remain? ​ There are solutions, which can range from reforestation to the creation of urban farms, to mini- parks or solar fields. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has done great work along those lines. ​ Cities like Cleveland, which once had nearly a million people, but today has less than 400,000, can’t use more than a handful of their vacant lots for redevelopment. Many of the rest can be greened, with benefit for the residents and their environment. Sadly, some cities have trouble with greening as a strategy because even though they’ve been losing population since the 1950s, they’re still unwilling to accept the reality that they’re never going to have the population they had back then. ​ There are amazing people and organizations in American cities trying to deal with these problems. Groups like the Cuyahoga County Land Bank in Cleveland, and Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation in Youngstown are doing great work. But they don’t have enough resources to tackle more than a small part of the problem. ​ That goes to a larger issue. If we are going to deal with abandoned properties at the scale that is needed, we need more local initiatives, we need better state laws, but above all, we need more resources, especially public money to cover the costs that the private sector won’t or can’t cover. ​ There have been many efforts in Washington as far back as the 1970s, along with efforts in many state capitals, to direct attention and resources to this issue, but none of them have ever gotten much traction. Here and there a one-shot infusion of funds has helped, but there’s been no long-term, serious effort. ​ Meanwhile, cities and rural areas continue to struggle with the problem without the resources to fix it. Sadly, it may be that most people are basically untroubled by the prospect of leaving large parts of America, and the people who live there, behind. ​ Note: Barrett and Greene recently wrote a column about abandoned properties for Route Fifty. ​ ​ ​

We’ve been watching city, state and county efforts at performance reporting for many years, and we know it’s hard to do. We applaud the governments that have moved forward aggressively in publicizing the results of programs -- whether they are good or bad. But even though we're fans of performance reporting, and the courage it takes to do it, that doesn't mean it's unproblematic. We bring this up because we just read an investigative report that was issued by Douglas Hoffer, the Vermont State Auditor, about the Vermont Annual Outcome Report. At the bottom of this blog post, you'll see a short video in which Hoffer addresses his complaints with his state's outcomes report. There are quite a few of them. Like us, the auditor is a fan of performance reporting. The first sentence in this 25-page critique notes that performance measurement when done well, “is a powerful tool that leads to evidence-based decision making, better program management, and greater accountability.” We don’t agree with all of his criticisms, but in our opinion, most of them have merit. In fact, a number of the problems he points out reflect the “don’ts" side of the recent ”Dos and Don’ts” paper we co-authored with the Urban Institute’s Harry Hatry and Batia Katz, and several other very knowledgeable contributors who have spent years studying this topic, including Maria Aristigueta of the University of Delaware, Don Moynihan Of Georgetown University and Kathy Newcomer of The George Washington University. (See our favorite, do’s and don’ts in our February 16 blog post.) Here are a few of the problems Auditor Hoffer points to: Vague goals. The auditor worries that the goals that drive Vermont’s performance outcome reporting are too broad and undefined. For example, one goal is that “Vermont has a prosperous economy.” But it’s not clear what that means or how it will be measured. Mysterious targets. In contrast to the broad goal for the economy, Vermont’s outcome report has targets that leave the reader with questions about how they were established. For example, the outcome report tracks the fall-related death rate and notes that the target is 116.9 per 100,000 adults. “It is not clear how this target was set up or what achieving the target means,” the investigative report notes. There is also no explanation for a 10% reduction in the target that was established in 2009. Lack of definitions, explanation or context. The report says that 93% of Vermont is covered by “state-of-the-art” telecommunications infrastructure. Yet, Hoffer points out that Vermont’s cellular and broadband coverage needs significant expansion and improvement and that it is “difficult to know what is measured by the indicator.” As an aside, the lack of solid and consistent definitions is a prime culprit in the problem of poor state data quality. There are other problems, and we encourage you to watch the video, which is not the most elegant, but makes many very good points. #PerformanceReporting #Audit #Auditor #AuditReport #Performance #Vermont #PerformanceMeasures #Outcome