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We’ve been toting up a list of problems in state and local purchasing and contracting. Whether the entity is large or small, in the middle of the country, the south, east or west, the same issues pop up repeatedly. Here are some procurement problems we’ve been tracking lately. Fuzzy contract language A Cincinnati audit in May looked at a contract with the nonprofit, Closing the Health Gap, and found that the language in the contract was broad in scope and lacked precise definitions of allowable costs. Weak oversight The internal audit office in Cincinnati also cited a lack of training to help contract administrators exercise adequate oversight. The lack of training leaves staff unsure of how to verify adherence to contract terms. A similar complaint about weak oversight appeared in a King County audit that focused on the contract with a non-profit that works on restoring licenses for people who can’t drive because of license suspensions. Contract database flaws In June, the City of Phoenix auditor reviewed the vendor validation process there and noted the problem of duplication of vendors in the procurement database. As we wrote in a blog post about California several weeks ago, the contract database there “contained numerous errors, essentially rendering it ineffective for its intended purpose.” Decentralization headaches Last year, the Kansas City Auditor found difficulties in the ability to access contracts, largely because agencies sometimes fail to use the centralized database to record information and provide contract documents. In an abstract that summed up the audit, the auditor’s office wrote “City contracts are not centralized, although the city’s regulations require centralization.” On occasion, when Kansas City contracts have been involved in legal disputes, the city simply could not locate the document and had to rely on copies of the contract obtained from the other party. Questionable performance measures In an audit of paratransit providers, the Office of the City Council Auditor in Jacksonville found that contract staff had altered pick up times, in an apparent effort to avoid rides being counted as late. Since late pickups are supposed to lead to penalties, the auditor was unable to determine if the contractor was paid accurately because the data had been changed. A lack of policies or consistent processes A Dallas audit in June noted inconsistencies among buyers in the way they conducted sole source and single bid procurements and how they documented their need. This lack of formal written approved and dated policies and processes is familiar to us from audits generally, as is a lack of documentation to support agency actions. Cybersecurity concerns Our upcoming Thursday column in Governing looks at the ways in which government workers compromise website security. One of the issues is inappropriate access and that also commonly appears in contract audits. For example, the Jacksonville paratransit audit chided the contractor for allowing inappropriate system access rights, and “lingering terminated user accounts.”

We’ve been fans of the Center for American Women and Politics for a long time. One of their most interesting ongoing projects is a website where they share the exact number of women currently serving in elective office. With this website as a resource, we thought it might be interesting to compare the number of women serving in elective office now with the number serving 30 years ago in 1987. In comparing these percentages, we were simultaneously struck by how far we’ve come as a country and how far we still have to go. We’ve assembled our comparisons in the form of a few animated GIFs. The number of women serving in U.S. Congress has steadily increased over time. From 5% in 1987 to 11% in 1997 to 16.1% in 2007 to 19.6% in 2017. Interestingly, from 1999-2001, 27.6 % of statewide elective executive offices were held by women so the number has come down slightly since then. As we examine these numbers we’re reminded of the words of Michelle Bachelet, the head of UN Women. “For me,” said Bachelet, “A better democracy is a democracy where women do not only have the right to vote and to elect but to be elected.”

The future of the City of Lawrence auditor’s office does not look good. Although no outright statement has been made saying the office is being defunded, that appears to be the situation. For readers who have not followed this saga in our blog, here’s a short version of the story. In spring 2016, Tom Markus, the new Lawrence City Manager, suggested eliminating the one-person audit office. The City Commission did not agree and the position was funded. In 2017, City Manager Markus tried again. He submitted his 2018 budget with 11 positions eliminated. Ten of the axed positions were vacant. The city auditor position was the only one that was filled. The Association of Local Government Auditors has sent letters arguing for the importance of performance auditing and we have discussed the Lawrence situation  and the importance of government auditing in this blog and in a not-yet-published column for Governing magazine. On June 14, the Lawrence Journal-World ran an editorial which called the city auditor’s office valuable, suggesting that “Perhaps the City of Lawrence should elevate — instead of eliminate — the role of city auditor.” Michael Eglinski, who has been Lawrence auditor since 2008, made a valiant fight to communicate the importance of his position. But the uncertainty of his job future was understandably difficult. He resigned in July to take a job as senior auditor with Johnson County Audit Services. (He says he likes his new job.) The City Auditor website in Lawrence contains a note that the position is empty. But we checked on the city’s job search site and saw that no auditor position had been posted. At the August 1 City Commission meeting, commissioners had a “first reading” vote, in which they approved the proposed 2018 budget, which includes the cut of the 11 positions. There will be a second reading vote at the commission meeting tonight, in which we suspect that the City Commission will give final approval to the budget plan, including the cuts. Funding could always be restored for this office in the future, but for now, it doesn’t appear likely that Lawrence will have a city auditor. (The easiest way to locate our blog posts on the importance of performance auditing is to look at the subject guides to our blog posts in our resources section.)

Our August Governing column is a bit of a rant about “broken links, outdated information and mysterious abbreviations” on state and local government websites. It looks like we’re not the only ones who are frustrated. Here’s a comment we saw this past weekend in a Kansas audit of liaison offices for African American Affairs, Latino American Affairs and Native American Affairs. “Although each liaison office maintains a public website, the contact information provided is limited and in many cases was incorrect. For example, the Kansas Native American Affairs Office’s website listed contact information for an Executive Director who had left more than two years ago. Additionally, the voicemail box for one executive director was full, which prevented us from leaving them a message. “Later an email error at the Kansas Hispanic and Latino American Affairs Commission prevented the Executive Director from sending or receiving messages. We did not attempt to determine what impact these problems might have on constituents who attempt to contact the liaison offices.” As we said in Governing, there is no question that public sector websites, in general, have improved dramatically in recent years. But way too often we encounter broken links and out-of-date information. Keeping info up-to-date and accurate is not a trivial issue. With citizens increasingly dependent on online information, it is fundamental.

The following piece about state legislatures and their relationship with executive branch managers is intended more as a teaser than anything else, We intend to do a great deal more reporting about the topic and publishing a longer piece in the future. As a result, what follows has been written based on 25-plus years of experience, and not any fresh reporting. During the many years when we were working on the Government Performance Project (which ceased publication about nine years ago), one of the topics we covered regularly was “human resources.” We’d ask all sorts of questions about the quality of training, hiring practices, recruitment and so on. In the majority of cases in which we were going to have to give a state a lower-than-desirable evaluation, it was a rare thing that the HR directors and their deputies were hearing anything new. No, they knew they needed more training, just as they knew they needed more up-to-date recruitment practices and more flexibility. So, why weren’t they doing what they thought they should be? The exceedingly commonplace answer was that the state legislature didn’t understand HR. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The fault wasn’t in themselves it was in their legislative stars.” We continue to hear the same story. And we’re aware of a similar issue when it comes to performance management. Many states and cities have embarked on laudable performance management systems. And many have used them in order to improve the management of individual agencies. But what happens when it comes to using the information gathered for budgeting purposes? You guessed it. We’re told that legislatures just don’t follow through for a variety of reasons. We won’t quote anyone here, but it’s startling to us how many of the executive branch managers with whom we speak use outright epithets when they’re talking about the legislative branch. The word “uninformed” comes up a whole lot. So does  “self-serving.” Do we buy into this ourselves? We’re not in a position to have a strong opinion, except to say that we’ve interviewed many scores of legislators and virtually all of them seem to us to be very bright, genuinely interested in the public benefit and — politically infighting aside — willing to work with agencies to create a government that functions at high-grade levels. So what do we take away from all of this? We think that if we were asked to assemble a list of the least functional elements of state government it would be the lack of good communications between the agencies and the legislators, notwithstanding all the hearings and opportunities for agency-folk to present their cases. The executive branch people who complain that the legislature isn’t doing what they’d like because they don’t understand the issues, may be missing the fact that — especially in tough economic times — many legislators are forced to make next-to-impossible decisions. If you cut budgets for schools instead of roads, you’re anti-education. If you do it the other way around, then you just don’t understand what it’s like to spend an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Split the difference and nobody is happy. By the same token, we’d be disingenuous were we not to acknowledge a tendency among some who sit in state legislatures to aim their votes squarely at the ballot box. They may well know that reductions in training budgets are a short-term solution that will cost productivity in the future. But they also know that nobody tends to win an election based on the “Make Training Great Again” platform. Can a more productive approach to better communications be developed. We’ll bet it can, in many states. But we  don’t have any ideas how, right now. That’s why we tried to take ourselves off the hook in the very first paragraph.

What often passes as citizen engagement in government is anything but engaging. Public meetings are often poorly attended. Formal hearings are deadly and can result in deepening antagonism. “Providing one to three minutes for public comment is generally not productive,” says Grayce Liu, general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment in the City of Los Angeles. “For me, there’s no point to throwing the doors open to city hall and then slapping people with procedures that are complex and make no sense. You lose the opportunity to connect.” In the ten years she’s worked for the city, Liu has been focused on finding better ways to create a more productive dialogue between citizens and government. She uses Improv techniques with her staff, emphasizing how to get to a “yes” answer instead of automatically saying no; she encourages innovation and speaking up because “we can’t say we want to empower the community to speak up, if we don’t model that with our staff.” One key, she says, is getting citizens to understand how government actions affect their day-to-day lives and then helping them learn how to advocate for what they want. In providing information, it’s important to learn “how to speak human again.” Liu’s department supports the city’s 97 neighborhood councils, which tend to get more respect than in many other cities. In Seattle, for example, Mayor Ed Murray dissolved ties between the city’s 13 neighborhood district councils and the government in 2016.  (A lack of council diversity seemed to be the factor that led to disbanding a three-decade old neighborhood council system.) In Los Angeles, the neighborhood councils are built into the city charter and provided with funding ($37,000 each). The system has a robust reputation and often attracts visitors from other countries who come to learn how the neighborhood councils work.  Visitors are often surprised. “They’re shocked at how much power our councils have over influencing what’s happening in their communities,” Liu says. Encouraging citizen engagement in Los Angeles is not without its challenges. There are a variety of smaller cities within Los Angeles County and many residents are unclear about whether they even live within City of Los Angeles borders. As in many places, people are also very unclear about which services are the responsibility of the county and which are delivered by the city. Then, too, there’s a communications challenge – there are 200 different languages spoken in L.A. So, identifying the need for translation services is part of the job. Over the years, Liu has seen stereotypes about government-citizen interaction fade away – not just among the citizens she works with, but in her own attitudes. She says people start out with an almost antagonistic view of the relationship between their neighborhoods and the government. “When I started and people asked me what I did, I’d say ‘I teach people how to fight the government.’” At one point, a business owner pointed out to her that what her office was really doing was teaching people how to get along with the government. “That humbled me,” Liu says. “That’s exactly what I want to do, but I got caught up in the stereotype of government vs. the public. “When you join government, they teach you about sexual harassment. They teach you about supervision. But they don’t teach you how to do civic engagement effectively. That’s something that needs to change if we’re going to get the type of public participation that is effective for creating a sustainable dialogue.”

Few challenges crop up with as much regularity in state and local audits as a lack of capacity – an absence of people, dollars, skills, and equipment to get jobs done. You might think this would be obvious. Everyone knows that you can’t lift a heavy fifteen foot piece of lumber without at least two people – one at each end. And yet, it’s surprising how many governments try to accomplish something very similar in service delivery. As Berkeley, California’s longtime auditor Ann-Marie Hogan wrote in a recent newsletter, “The City’s most important asset is its people. An immediate risk to operations and strategic, long-term planning is workload capacity: Does the City have the staff resources to provide expected, promised and critical services.” We asked Hogan where she thought workload issues were the most intense? “I particularly see capacity issues in support departments – IT and Finance – because of the nature of the work,” wrote Hogan in an e-mail to us. “There is also a problem with turnover, particularly noticeable in those two departments, at least in part because the dot-com explosion of jobs in our region is sucking up the talent.” There’s some irony to the fact that Hogan’s audit office has its own resource issues (as do many of its peers). Hogan has had to delay several planned audits , because of staff turnover in her office, as well as staff turnover in other departments. We wondered why, in relatively robust economic times in California, capacity worries are escalating. One reason, she said, was that the large ambitious projects, made possible when there’s money available, eat up staff time like a school of killer sharks. For example, Berkeley, is tackling decades of deferred maintenance and the implementation of a new and much needed enterprise-wide technology system. Just as in 12-step programs, one of the keys to dealing with capacity issues is recognizing that they exist in the first place. Hogan is tackling  the problem head on with several of her planned 2018 audits including a look at capacity issues for public safety dispatchers and a look at workload issues for the city’s code enforcement.

Measuring performance and doing it well takes a huge amount of effort. So, it’s too bad that one of the most common complaints about performance measurement systems is that they are not sufficiently used to drive program performance. This past weekend, we were listening to the GovInnovator podcast – one of our favorites – and wanted to flag the recent interview with Reggie Bicha, executive director of the Colorado Department of Human Services. In the 12-minute interview with GovInnovator host Andy Feldman, Bicha provides a great description of how his department really uses the outcome and key process measures in its C-Stat system to drive better performance. “Every Wednesday, from 3 to 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I sit down in our C-Stat room . . . with my senior team and meet with various program directors from our department who are responsible for achieving the goals we’ve set out. We dive into the measures. We’re looking at data and asking ourselves where things are going well, why they are going well and what does the data tell us about our performance and how do we replicate that in other parts of the state? “Where things aren’t going so well, what does the data tell us about that? Why isn’t it going well and what can we do, in as real time as we can do it, to change our practice, our policies, our computers, whatever it’s going to take, in order to get the performance that the people in Colorado are expecting from us.” In the podcast, Bicha explains how the C-Stat system has required an evolution in the culture of the organization, including the hiring of new employees who understand how to gather, analyze and work with data. It has also meant developing ways to push performance measurement through the layers of the organizations to the counties and contractors who are delivering services. He describes how the data allows his department to move beyond anecdote and explode myths. The podcast also delves into major challenges – for example, the political fallout when your own data very publicly reveals program problems. One of the accomplishments described focuses on how the department used its C-Stat system to chronicle and better understand the use of physical restraints and seclusion in the two psychiatric hospitals it oversees. This led to the near elimination of the need for seclusion, through the development of de-escalation rooms (with soft music and recliners) instead.  “We recognize that the vast majority of people we serve . . . have experienced trauma multiple times in their life,” he says. “We need to make certain that the practices we’re implementing (don’t) exacerbate the trauma they’ve already experienced or, worse yet, create new traumas for them.” One more note about the podcast itself: Since 2012, Feldman has been running GovInnovator as a “personal, after work and weekend” project to share “practices and insights from public sector innovators and experts.” There are currently more than 150 interviews available on the website, covering topics central to results-focused public management and including all three levels of government: Federal, state and local.

“We will neglect our cities at our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.” President John F. Kennedy Special Message to Congress, 1961

We don’t have any personal opinions of whether New York should or shouldn’t hold a constitutional convention. But we have enormous sympathy for the advocates of the convention, who confront the continued existence of the widely publicized and inaccurate statement that the convention will cost the state $350 million. New Yorkers will vote yes or no on this issue in November and the convention, if it’s held, will take place in 2019. (The potential of a constitutional convention rises up in New York every 20 years.) Here’s the problem: According to a July blog post at The Rockefeller Institute of Government, the alleged cost of the convention has been used by opponents as an argument against. But the $350 million figure is an error. It stems from a miscalculation made by a reporter.  Here’s what happened: In the late 1960s, a constitutional convention was held in New York and it cost about $7.6 million (about 25 percent less than the legislature projected it would cost). During a “media boot camp” in December 2015, political scientist New York State expert Gerald Benjamin took the $7.6 million cost of the convention, added an inflation factor to present an estimated $47 million cost in 2015 dollars. Albany Times-Union Reporter Casey Seiler then used the $47 million figure in an article, presuming that this was actually the unadjusted 1967 convention price tag.  Once the article was published, the cost figure took on a life of its own, with convention opponents applying an inflation figure again and arriving at $350 million. As blog authors Peter G. Galie and Chropher Bopst point out, this figure is high enough to scare both conservatives and liberals.  They say the erroneous figure is now being used in anti-convention literature, and call it “manna from heaven for constitution opponents.” As the Rockefeller blog post points out, reporter Seiler nobly owned up to his error in a February 2017 article that is headlined “Only off by $300 million” and which has as its first line “Mistakes were made. By me.” It’s quite a funny article (unfortunately available only by subscription.) But the key point is in the last line. “If you hear anyone throw out [the $350 million] number, tell them it’s bunk — and tell them I said so,” he wrote.

The Massachusetts state auditor’s office is well-known for its work in utilizing sophisticated data analysis to uncover public benefit fraud. This work is continuing, but the office has focused lately on several other aspects of the social service safety net that relate much more to the quality of services. A key issue is access to service. As auditor Suzanne Bump said last fall, “It is essential that these programs operate with integrity. That means fighting abuse and fraud, but it also requires that we work to identify the barriers that prohibit Massachusetts residents from accessing benefits for which they are eligible.” The first of several planned audits on barriers to access came out last month and focused on the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund, which helped 500 families with about $5.4 million in assistance between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2015, the period covered by the audit. The program is designed to help families deal with seriously ill children who have expenses that aren’t covered or have been denied by health insurance. These medical expenses may include hotel stays for medical visits far from home or costs for equipment, medication, or home/car modifications. Bump said the audit showed the program is doing “the good work it was intended to do.” But, as with so many excellent public policy ideas, there are some aspects of implementation that fall short. The audit found that families, on average wait 289 days from the time they apply to application approval. During most of this period, applications “sat idle” waiting to be assigned to staff. Only when a staff assignment was made were applicants informed that additional financial or other information was needed. “Families of children with catastrophic illness face immense financial and emotional hardship,” auditor Bump said. “Our audit found that long delays in application processing is unnecessarily extending this financial and emotional burden.” The auditor’s office looked at the timing for processing applications in six other states that had similar programs. It found that Alaska, Idaho, Virginia and West Virginia processed applications in one to three months. New Jersey and New Mexico fell in a range more similar to Massachusetts, between 8 and 11 months.

As journalists, we don’t get squadrons of letters complaining about the things we’ve written. The fact that we don’t write about politics probably helps a lot (by definition, any political reporter is susceptible to attack by people who disagree — even if the article he or she has written is 100% based on accurate information and solid quotes). Still, it’s the nature of the game that journalists who publish to a wide audience are going to hear back from time to time from that audience — sometimes simply to correct a genuine error, sometimes to dispute the thesis of the piece, sometimes because there’s a desire to vent. It has long been a pet peeve of ours, that said, that many note writers (now, mostly communicating by e-mail) feel some kind of need (go ask Freud) to be vituperative in tone, whether or not they have a reasonable dispute with the journalist. Many a note begins with words like: “It’s unfathomable to me that you call yourself a journalist even though you clearly have no grasp of the topic about which you recently wrote, and have no respect for the facts.” With the expansion of media outlets, there may well be people writing who really have no respect for the facts. But we think they are few and far between. And that group doesn’t include us. Why be rude? It doesn’t do anyone any good. It doesn’t make it more likely to get a retraction, an apology or even a civil letter in return. So, rule number one is the same rule as we’d like to see governing the world: Be civil. That will get you more attention, and ultimately, more satisfaction.  Maybe you can persuade the journalist that there’s another side to the story told, and he or she will write a follow-up piece. We’ll never forget the note that Rich got some years ago suggesting that the writer hoped that his mother would be hit by a Mack Truck.  The combination of outright hostility and specificity was jarring, and went far enough that he never wrote back. A few other rules of thumb: Be clear as to what the errors you’re complaining about actually are. Indicating that “this article was so riddled with errors that I can’t believe it,” doesn’t even give a journalist the opportunity to provide a defense or admit failure. And if you can’t really cite a specific error, but just disagree with the conclusions of the piece, then say that. Tell the journalist exactly what you want. Are you looking for a retraction, or just to help the writer get things righter in the future? Try to avoid getting the journalist’s name wrong.  This is just silly. But you’d be surprised how many notes we get addressed to Mr. Barrett and Ms. Greene, when in fact our genders are the other way around. Unless there’s a good reason not to do so, let the author know who you are, beyond your name. This has become more of an issue since e-mail became ubiquitous. People sign off with a first name, and don’t give the writer any idea what kind of mindset they may have, given their job. (Of course, everyone who takes the time to write deserves equal respect — whether it’s a 12-year-old fulfilling a school assignment to write a letter to a journalist or the governor of a state.) Try not to sound like a lawyer, unless you are a lawyer. Be clear as to whether you’re writing in order to let the writer know about an error, or to dispute the conclusions. In our case, we’ve gotten far more of the latter group than the former, and — given the opportunity — will reach out to the correspondent to talk things over. Some of these conversations have actually resulted in long-standing, positive relationships.