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Just the other day, we were editing a Guest Column for this website (we won’t bother to mention the name of the author) and discovered that a whole handful of initiatives mentioned were called “best practices.”   As far as we could see. there was no evidence that these efforts were really the 100%, absolute, no-questions-about it, best. They were ways that had worked before to approach a particular set of problems.   In this case, we were able to edit the piece – with the author’s approval – and used the term “proven practices”. Sometimes when we’re quoting someone in a column (or citing a phrase from a study or a report) we’re stuck with the phrase “best practice,” as we don’t change direct quotes to suit ourselves.   There may be cases in which best practices can apply from city to city and state to state. Best budgeting practices, for example – such as those developed by the Government Finance Officers Association – can certainly be useful. It’s an accepted best practice in budgeting, for example, that entities should cover current year expenditures with current year revenues -- not revenues borrowed from the future. Outside of budgeting, there are some other areas in which the phrase best practice is appropriate. And many of them. which may not have held true in the past, are now thankfully self-evident. In human resources, for example, it's certainly a best practice to make every effort to avoid explicit or implicit racism in hiring or recruiting. Or consider the realm of information technology, where no one can deny that sufficient training can be fairly called a best practice. Before we go on, it seems worthwhile for us to provide our own definition of "best practice." Others may disagree, but it's the way the words sound to us. We believe that the ubiquitous phrase should be used to describe management policies that can be applied pretty much universally. Best practices, we'd argue, should be something like plug and play models that others can pick up and use with a solid assurance of success. But that's often not the way the words are used. For example, the latest glittery idea that seems appealing (but has only been proven as worthwhile in a smattering of places) can often be dubbed as best. People writing reports for any number of significant organizations will take the study of a handful of cities or states and list approaches they’ve uncovered as “best.” Not to seem cynical, but we've noticed that often the words "best practice" are used in consulting firms to sell their own approaches. For years, it was considered a best practice that states set aside exactly 5% of revenues in their rainy day funds. No more. No less. When we researched the topic, we discovered that precise number emanated from an off-the-cuff comment in a speech given by a leader in one of the ratings agencies. As years have passed, thinking on the topic has grown more sophisticated. The Volcker Alliance, for example, has thrown that 5% figure out the window and encourages states to tie their reserve funding to the volatility of revenues. Here are five reasons we are concerned when a best practice is ballyhooed by a government official. 1) Ideas that work in rural areas often don't apply well to densely populated cities/   2) Approaches for homogeneous regions may leave out elements important in places with greater diversity.   3) Things that work well in healthy economic times may need to be forgotten in the depths of a recession.   4) Changing times generally require new solutions. For example, in the depths of the pandemic, it was a best practice not to shake hands. Nowadays, people even hug hello.   5) The label is too often applied before a notion has been properly evaluated and proven to be generally workable.   Fortunately, there are alternative phrases that can be somewhat more accurate. We prefer "promising," "leading," or "accepted" practice. None of these reflects a universally, unquestionably, absolutely superior way of doing government business.   We don’t think this is all a matter of semantics. When a practice is labeled as the “best,” that can easily stand in the way of the evolution of thinking that’s necessary for progress in states and localities. If we know the best way to do something, then why look for a better way? And the search for better functioning government is the core of what we do for a living. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #EvidenceBasedPractices #BestPracticeCynicism #ErroneousBestPracticeLabeling #AvoidingBestPracticeLabels #StateandLocalBudgeting #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #CityBudgeting #StateManagement #LocalManagement #PerformanceManagement #EvidenceBasedManagement #EvidenceBasedDecisionMaking #EvidenceBasedDecisionMakingShortcoming #GovernmentConsultantOverreach #CityGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalSocialEquity #CityGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalPublicAdministration #CityPublicAdministration #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

Over the course of time, we’ve written repeatedly about the confusion many Americans have about which level of government provides which services. The example we typically use deals with roads: How many people can tell you whether a road near their home is owned and managed by their city, county or state? The answer is very few.   But in the past, we’ve largely omitted confusion about the services provided by localities that are generally thought of as the province of the federal government. This kind of civic illiteracy means that blame or credit for the success of efforts is often misplaced.   A few weeks ago, we pointed to one strong example; the widespread impression that threats of climate change are exclusively a federal problem. But as a recently released report from the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) , points out that,  the feds aren’t the only level of government that must be involved in meaningful solutions. That’s true in large part because adapting infrastructure to climate change is fundamentally a local government issue. As   we wrote , “the potential impact is site-specific, local governments are primary responders to their communities' needs, and local governments have authority over land use.”   That’s just one example. Medicaid is another. A physician we know long talked about the Medicaid system as being very generous. Of course, that was because he was based in New York State, which provides a solid package of benefits. But just because New York did so, that didn’t mean that other places did, which would be the case only if Medicaid were exclusively a federal function. In fact, as most of the people reading this are aware, Medicaid is funded in large part by the states which administer the program. Still, when candidates for national office talk about the potential of cutting back on Medicaid, it’s easy to believe that the program belongs exclusively in their province. Education is yet another area where there’s a vast amount of confusion. While the threat to defund the Department of Education is politically charged, that  department only provides less than 14% of funding for public K-12 education. That doesn’t mean its role isn’t important. But it’s not where the big dollars come from. One more: The Environmental Protection Agency gets credit for its hugely successful efforts to ensure that people have clean air and clean water. But the local governments play a huge role. They use zoning laws to control land use in a way that prevents water contamination; they manage water supply systems and it’s their job to determine the effectiveness of national water management programs. We think this is a particularly pertinent time as election day draws near. Confusion over the place where services are delivered can translate into voting for the principles you believe; but not for the right person. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityandCountyManagement #IntergovernmentalPartnership #StateLocalPublicAdministration #DedicatedtoStateandLocalGovernment #StateLocalManagementClimateChange #ClimateChangePerformanceManagement #CityClimateChangeManagement #StateandLocalInfrastructure #CityGovernmentManagement #CityGovernmentPerformance #CityZoningManagement #IntergovernmentalInfrastructureManagement #StateMedicaidManagement #IntergovernmentalEducationPolicyandManagement #CivicEducation #IntervovernmentalEnvironmentPolicyandManagement #LocalStateFederalPartnership #NationalAcademyPublcAdministration #NAPA #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

A little over a year ago, we wrote a column for Route Fifty  about the remarkably ambitious host of efforts that Fort Worth, Texas was making to re-invent its budgeting processes, on eight fronts: including, as we wrote in the column, “ implementing priority-based budgeting; improved use of data analytics and benchmarking; comprehensive planning; a strategic investment plan and bond program; departmental strategic planning; “sunrise” reviews; use of Lean Six Sigma principals; a Government Finance Officers Association Rethinking Budgeting fellowship; and strategic foresight studies done with the aid of futurists.   The day after the feature appeared, we got a note from a well-respected official in one of the nation’s largest counties who wrote to say that, while he was impressed at the city’s goals, he’d be surprised if it accomplished more than one or two of them. That got us to thinking about the many times when we write about a city, county or state that is embarking on an ambitious agenda and then never go back again to see what really happened when inertia meets momentum, and political power gets in the way of managerial progress.   We’ve complained over the years about the lack of follow through on new programs by the entities involved. So, this felt like a good time to put ourselves to the test. We forwarded an e-mail to ourselves at the time to remind us to check in with Fort Worth in a year to see what had happened in the intervening months.   The reason for our optimism last year was the city had an unusually collaborative ethos, with the city manager and the council working closely together and that it had a running start thanks to many years during which it had acidulously gathered data about many of its activities, which provided a powerful launching pad for the budgetary equivalent of a rocket ship to Mars.    Following, are some of the efforts that we highlighted a year ago, and the progress that’s been made. The purpose of this B&G Report isn’t so much to pat Forth Worth on the back or even to provide a model for other cities to follow, but rather to make the point that while it’s easy to be dubious about ambitious undertakings, with concerted effort they can be made to happen.   Back a year ago, for example, we wrote that phase one of the city’s efforts – notably priority-based budgeting (PBB) –involved three departments: police, human resources and transportation and public works. Today, there are nine: p olice, transportation and public works, human resources, development services, information technology, library, municipal court, environmental services, and neighborhood services.   From something close to a standing start a year ago, with the help of Resource X (now a division of Tyler Technologies), the city now has a full inventory of the programs and services it offers internally and externally and knows what it costs to provide them.  “This is a level of programmatic transparency that we never achieved at the line-item level,” reports Cooke. “In police, for example, we guided the department through an intensive time study in order to allocate each position to its related program/service.  The process illuminated gaps in services and areas where resources were stretched thin, which led to decision packages (budget requests) that were submitted – and some approved – through the FY2025 budget process.  Without the PBB program inventory and related data, police’s submissions would have been created and ranked differently.”   Another one of the city’s major efforts was to do comprehensive planning, and it’s moving forward on that front as well. “We’re in the process of doing our next comprehensive plan,” says Cooke, “It’s called Re-imagine Fort Worth 2050 Comprehensive Plan, and is the first time in the last 20 years that we have had a high level of public engagement rather than it being a staff-driven effort.”   On the data analytics front, the city has inventoried all its numerous databases to lead toward the development of a data warehouse for a “one-truth” source of information for City use. Additionally, it has built numerous dashboards and modeling that analyze fire overtime, appropriate minimum wage for our economy, and housing inventories.   A couple of other initiatives that Cooke talked about a year ago were  to begin implementing both Lean Six Sigma and Sunrise Reviews. Though the city is still at the very beginning of its current foray into the world of Lean Six Sigma (though it had made efforts in the past to do so) and it hasn’t done any sunset review yet, “We hired a new strategic initiatives manager in June to implement both Lean Six Sigma and sunrise reviews,” says Cooke “These are both part of the program/process evaluation toolbox we will use when we identify trends.”   Fort Worth has hardly crossed any finish lines yet, and Cooke describes all these efforts as long-term ones, but progress is being made and the train is still on the tracks. To hear Cooke go into more depth about the work being done in Fort Worth, sign up for a November 15 Government Finance Officers Association webinar  in which he is participating.   #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #CityGovernmentManagement #FTWorthCityManagement #CityGovernmentPerformance #CityDataGovernance #CityTechnologyManagement #CityInnovation  #FortWorthPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalDataGovernance #CityPublicAdministration #PriorityBasedBudgeting #CityGovernmentBudgeting #StateandLocalgovernmentBudgeting #LeanSixSigma #CityManagerDavidCooke #CitySunRiseReview #ResourceX #TylerTechnologies #FortWorthPoliceBudget #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #GFOA #RethinkingBudgetingInitiative #FortWorthDataAnalytics #CityDataAnalytics #FortWorthComprensivePlan #CityStrategicPlanning #CityBenchmarking #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc #RouteFifty

Back in March, in collaboration with Donald F. Kettl professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, we wrote a book titled “The Little Guide to Writing for Impact” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) The goal of the book was to help academically-trained writers communicate in a way that will make it more likely that practitioners, policy-makers, legislators, legislative staff and the general public will read what they’ve written – and ideally take actions based on the good ideas presented. Here are eight of the recommendations made in the first chapter of the book. Choose a good title. This can be the first introduction to readers about your work and what it’s about. If the title is long or confusing, impatient readers may move elsewhere rapidly and never have a chance to learn from what you’ve written. Many people who are trained in academic writing are inclined to write titles that go on and on until they’ve basically written the first line of the piece. Frame your thesis early on. Any informative writing ought to have a thesis. Having that clearly in your mind and then presenting it in a straightforward way will lure your readers in Once you’ve intrigued your readers thoroughly enough to get them to keep reading, be sure to write a great conclusion. A short excursion into “questions for future research” can work, but you don’t want the paper to end by appearing to push the biggest questions off to another researcher or to your own future project. KISS is shorthand for “Keep it simple, stupid,” which keeps readers going after you’ve gotten them to start. Avoiding jargon is key. Careful technical language helps to avoid confusion, of course. Air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration, for example, have developed very precise terms for guiding aircraft both in the sky and on the ground to prevent collisions, as several crashes in the past occurred when controllers thought they were saying one thing and pilots heard something different. A poor reason for using technical language is to make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. That obstructs easy reading and drives readers away. Though it can be tempting to write in the order in which ideas occur to you, that’s likely not the order a reader can find most helpful. The World Bank’s guide to report writing offers some counsel and a variety of alternatives: “In addition to having good topic sentences, paragraphs must have a clear and logical organization.” Avoid Offense. There’s no place for gender-limiting language in writing. For a very long time, “he” was the pronoun of choice for writers, and that left out a whole lot of human beings. Writers tried to correct that by using “he or she,” but that often turned out to be awkward. “They” has begun to emerge, but not everyone has yet accepted it. An easy solution is to pluralize. Instead of writing that “He couldn’t defend himself” when referring to a person who could be male, female, or nonbinary, try the plural: “Public figures have a hard time defending themselves when they’ve been the target of media attacks.” That is smoother and avoids the awkward use of “they” in the singular. Talk to your dog. The most important point of all is formulating an idea that is sharp and clear. The early 140-character limit on Twitter had one great virtue: if you can capture the point of your paper in 140 characters, you can explain it to everyone. How do you do that? Our co-author Don Kettl talks to his dog, who, he reports, never argues back and who often proves an exceptionally good audience. Intrigued? Want to know much more about writing for impact? Then here’s an unabashedly self promotional idea. Buy the book. You can do that by clicking here.   #WritingForImpact #StateandLocalGovernmentCommunication #StateandLocal #StateLocalPolicyImplementation #DedicatedToStateandLocalGovernment #BarrettandGreeneInc #BandGReport #DonaldFKettl #KatherineBarrett #RichardGreene #RowmanAndLittlefield #TheLittleGuideToWritingForImpact #WritingTipsForGovernmentImpact #WritingGuideForPolicyImpact

In conversations that we’ve had lately with people in human resources and elsewhere in government, we’ve found ourselves repeatedly chatting about challenges with their newest cadre of employees: members of the so-called Generation Z. Generally, members of Generation Z are labeled as those who are currently aged 12 to 27. A number of traits tend to be associated with this group, including a desire for real-time feedback. But one of the most significant characteristics associated with them is a yearning for a solid work-life balance. That’s a good thing, especially as there’s been growing recognition about the hazards of workplace burnout, but we’ve heard repeatedly that it can create difficulties when employers would like a little more focus on work and a little less attention to everything else. In a conversation about this phenomenon a friend of ours described a young employee who shocked her boss by abruptly leaving an important meeting at precisely the time she had been told her workday was to end. We bring this all up out of concern that in a search for easy solutions falling back on generational stereotypes can have perverse effects. (And it’s not only the older generations who fall prey to stereotyping. Some members of Gen Z are inclined to complain that baby boomers are too fixed in their ways. Have you heard the phrase, “OK Boomer?” It’s not intended as a compliment.)   While there may be truth to some of the understandings about members of Gen Z,, these kinds of broad generalizations lump people together with a one-size-fits-all approach that ultimately isn’t helpful. The assumption that individuals born in a certain time frame all share similar traits, may be somewhat more accurate than judging them by their sign of the Zodiac, but it doesn’t provide the entire picture by any means. We know that people from Gen Z – or any other generation – are going to vary as much by the region of the country in which they live, their level of education, ethnicity, family culture and background as they are by the year in which they were born. Beyond that, descriptions of any generation run the risk of describing them at a certain point in time, before years pass, the world changes, and their attitudes towards things morph as well. The baby boomers, like us, are currently labeled as optimistic, competitive, effective at decision making and self-sufficient. And yet any number of people we know – some of them well – who are part of our generation are pessimistic, non-competitive, wishy-washy and dependent on others. And that’s how our generation is perceived right now. Consider this from Generation Check  which writes about how baby boomers, like us were thought of when they first emerged on the scene:  “Sometimes called "flower children," they advocated for peace and non-violence, coining the phrase ‘Make love, not war.’ They typically follow vegetarian diets and have their unique fashion sense: long hair, long dresses for the women, and large rimless glasses. Hippies listened to folk and rock music and were inspired by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, and similar musicians.” Of course, we understand that it’s important for employers – whether in the private or the public sector – to try to create an environment in which employees are most likely to succeed. But when employers lean too much on the year an employee was born, instead of an understanding of individual needs and aspirations, there’s every chance that they’ll be aiming their human resource arrows at the wrong targets. #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #StateandLocalWorkforce #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #CityGovernmentManagement #CityHumanResources #CityWorkforce #CountyGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #DedicatedToStateandLocalGovernment #WorkplaceGenerations #GenerationalStereotyping #B&GReport #PerformanceManagement #PublicSectorHumanResources #PublicSectorWorkforce #CityandCountyManagement #BarrettandGreeneInc

We love cities. Though we moved out of Manhattan a few years ago for the little town of Bethel, Connecticut, we’ll live the rest of our lives thinking of ourselves as New Yorkers, while still enjoying a place where you can find deer crossing the street at night and the supermarket checkout person knows us by name.   But to go back to where we began: We love cities. We love songs about them (“I Left My Heart in San Francisco), TV shows set in them (Seinfeld) and Broadway musicals where they are part of the story (Chicago, obviously).   Finally, we believe it’s true for many metropolises (and not just New York) that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. With that in mind, and to give our brains a break from a week in which all the news is coming out of Washington D.C., we’ve gathered a dozen lovely quotes from works of fiction about them. Some we knew. Some we found online. And others came from our big fat shelf of quotation books. Here they are (and if you’d like to share favorites of your own, we’d love to hear them):   ·        “All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.” Christopher Morley, “Where the Blue Begins”   ·        “When they fall in love with a city it is for forever. As though there were never a time when they didn’t love it.” Toni Morrison, “Jazz”   ·        “The {World’s] fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.” Eric Larson, “Devil in the White City”   ·        "A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart ..." Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”     ·        “Cities are not people, but I think they might be sentient.” N.K. Jemisin, “ City We Became”   ·        “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”   ·        To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” Ling Ma, “Severance”       ·        “Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.” Neal Shusterman, “Downsiders”   ·        “For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.”  Simon Van Booy, “Everything Beautiful Began After”     ·        “The most beautiful city in the world is one where you are happy.” Erich Maria Remarque, “The Night In Lisbon”   ·        “What is the city but the people.” William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus #CityQuotes #CitiesInFiction #B&GReport #BarrettandGreeneInc #DedicatedToStateandLocalGovernment

Walter Winchell, one of America’s most popular syndicated gossip columnists and radio commentators from the 1920s through the early 1960s once called West Haven, Connecticut “the most corrupt little city in America.”   Clearly there was a fair amount of hyperbole there – and we have no idea why he singled out West Haven (truth in advertising: it’s the hometown of Richard Greene, co-author of this piece). But in recent years, it appears that West Haven has endured some problems which bring Winchell’s snide comment to mind. There are a few examples but the one which has achieved the greatest notoriety was the theft of more than $1.2 million in COVID relief funds by a Connecticut state representative who was also employed as administrative assistant to the city council of West Haven.  As the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut   explained in a release, “he conspired with others to steal these funds and other West Haven funds through the submission of fraudulent invoices, and subsequent payment, for COVID relief goods and services that were never provided.” We bring this up not to bash West Haven, or to leave anyone with the idea that government is riddled with bad guys (anyone who reads our work knows we think quite the opposite) but to make the point that corruption isn’t exclusively the province of larger cities, but wrinkles its way into the life of smaller cities, as well.   A couple of years ago, we wrote a column in Route Fifty  about Durango, Colorado. In that community, which is the biggest city in rural La Plata County and the location for a few key scenes in the film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the longtime finance director, resigned in October 2019 and subsequently pled guilty to two felony charges related to  $712,000 in embezzled funds . At the time, our research also led us to a fascinating documentary called, “All the Queen’s Horses.”  That was all about a $53 million embezzlement that occurred over many years by the Dixon, Illinois comptroller, who worked in that small city (population currently about 15,000) from 1983 until her indictment in 2012. You can read our interview with the producer and director of the documentary, Kelly Richmond Pope , an accounting professor at DePaul University, here .   Apparently, no town is too small to be hit by corruption. Leyden, Massachusetts has a population of under 800. In April, a press release from the state’s Office of the Inspector General  revealed that “f ollowing an investigation conducted by the Office of the Inspector General, Daniel J. Galvis, Leyden’s former Chief of Police, was arraigned in Greenfield District Court today on numerous charges related to items embezzled from the Town of Leyden.”   The problem in communities like these is frequently the lack of appropriate oversight. And though they may not have the kind of staff that large cities do, once taxpayer dollars are involved, keeping tabs on what’s being done with them is a clear duty that community leaders assume. As a 2016 article  from Columbia Law School explained, “ While news headlines often focus on issues of corruption within state or federal governments, the effects of corruption within local municipalities is equally problematic. First, there are many thousands of small cities and towns in the United States, depending on one’s definition. And these governments receive and spend billions of dollars in public funds. For obvious reasons, however, small cities and towns typically operate with few employees, and have limited resources to expend on non-essential personnel and programs.   “This means that the very nature of small municipalities makes them susceptible to corruption, because their small size and workforce do not allow for the kind of oversight and enforcement mechanisms that larger cities, state governments, and the federal government can employ. Nor can small towns usually count on oversight from county-level or state oversight mechanisms, at least absent a specific complaint about egregious conduct that is deemed important enough for higher-level officials to pursue.”   There’s certainly truth to that, but it doesn’t mean that smaller communities can just run away from the battle because they don’t have a big enough army. As the city manager of Durango who took over after the scandal told us in an interview that followed the Route Fifty article , cities with smaller populations can model themselves on bigger cities and not view size as a barrier. “Some people who have not been in a bigger city have this shield. ‘Oh, no. Can’t do that. . . They have more resources than we’ll ever have.   “I think there’s ways where you can scale a lot of those things. I may not have a 30-member accounting department, but I have 15 and I can be able to do some things in a better way. “I think sometimes the bravado of coming from a small town or representing a small town (makes us think) we can’t do it like bigger towns. There’s a lot of processes that are out there that I think you can definitely scale down so as not to be intimidated by the processes of bigger areas. Look at them and say. ‘What can I bring in?’"   #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentFraud #StateandLocalGovernmentCorruption #CityCorruption #CityFraud #SmallTownEmbezzlement #PublicEmployeeEmbezzlement #SmallCityInternalControl #LocalInternalControl #LocalGovernmentOversight #StateandLocalGovernmentOversight #SmallCityOversight #B&GReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

Good day, Last week we were talking to an inquisitive person who is rising in the local public sector world. The conversation turned to performance management (one of our favorite topics) and the question was posed to us: “What do you think are the biggest impediments to more widespread use of that discipline? A few answers quickly sprang to our minds, including limited resources and difficulties hiring staff with the necessary skills. But we’re writing this note to you, state and local elected decision-makers, because the foremost thought in our minds was that the challenge is often you. Not all of you certainly. Not even most of you. But certainly, enough of you to encourage us to write this note. Over many years, we’ve talked to scores, maybe hundreds, of people who have dedicated their lives to managing government performance. And they often tell us (usually off the record) that it’s the mayors, councilmembers, governors and legislators who stand in their way. Sometimes solid performance management operations – including the emphasis on evidence-based practices, evaluations, and performance measurements – can be downplayed, unused or ignored. In more extreme instances, there have been threats to defund, denature or entirely shut down performance management operations altogether. Why are performance management efforts underused? For one thing, performance measures that have the potential to inform the public about programmatic success can also point out failures. That can be highly useful for those who want to take steps to improve performance. But after a ribbon-cutting ceremony, who really wants to hear that a heralded program didn’t work out?    What’s more, in the real political world, negative data can be used to beat up on politicians when it comes to election time. As Marc Holzer, a well-known academic and a pioneer in the field of performance management, told us some months ago, “We have a lot of data out there and a lot of performance measures. But most citizens don’t have access to that because it’s not communicated to them. And in many cases, it’s deliberately hidden . . .” We blame some of our colleagues in the press for this phenomenon. It’s always been the case that bad news drives out good news, which justifiably may make some of you wary that reporters will be sour cherry picking the bad news from a performance report – even one that is largely positive. We hope we’ve established that we understand the motivations for wanting to push performance information aside. But when elected officials do so, they are missing the idea that people trust candor. As we wrote in Route Fifty  in February, “People mistrust what they don’t understand. They’re more inclined to have faith in an institution that is candid, even if it’s open about mistakes or ‘performance is proven to be poor,’ says Michael Pagano, dean emeritus of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, Chicago. ‘If voters trust that the government is providing accurate information, they will continue to trust’” One group, in particular, that we’d suggest that you support are your performance auditors and evaluators, whether they come from the executive or legislative branches. Their reports contain the kind of vital, practical data and recommendations that can help make government run more efficiently and effectively. And when that’s the case, there will be lots to brag about when election time rolls around. #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalPerformanceAudit #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalDataGovernment #CountyGovernmentManagement #StateGovernmentManagement #CityPerformanceAudit #CountyPerformanceAudit #StatePerformanceAudit #TrustInGovernment #ElectedOfficialsandPerformanceReporting #GovernmentPerformanceReporting #MediaGovernmentCoverage #RouteFifty #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

With the Fourth of July right around the corner, many Americans are looking forward to a day off from work, cookouts and fireworks. Yet according to a study released a year ago , four of ten can’t tell you what actually happened that day. And even the remaining six out of ten who were given credit for getting the  “correct” answer cited by the survey got it wrong too! That’s because the study said the right answer was “the signing of the Declaration of Independence,” which didn’t actually happen that day altogether. In fact, July 4th was the day when the Constitutional Congress first approved the final wording of the document. It wasn’t signed until August 2nd. And the Congress actually decided to declare independence two days earlier, on July 2nd. (Truth in advertising: We had to look all that stuff up, on ConstitutionFacts.Com . ) We bring all this up because the Fourth of July gives us an excuse to get on our soapboxes and complain about the lack of civics literacy in America – specifically in the area we spend our lives covering: state and local government. The most recent data we could find about the knowledge most Americans have about their states came from a 2018 study by Johns Hopkins University  (and it’s our guess that things haven’t gotten any better since then). A few of the facts that study uncovered: More than half of respondents didn’t know if their state had a constitution. About three quarters didn’t know if there were special purpose districts in their state About half didn’t know if their state had a one house or two-house legislature or whether it allowed ballot initiatives An astounding one of three couldn’t name their governor We’re just speculating here, but we suspect that the levels of knowledge about cities and small towns is probably somewhat better. We can’t imagine that very many adults can’t name their mayor. But when it comes to counties, as we wrote about eight months ago , “It's long interested us to see how many well-educated friends of ours have been almost entirely ignorant of the significance of counties. This may be largely explained because many of them are from New York City, and so aren’t living in a part of the country where the word ‘county’ comes up very frequently or in Connecticut, the one state that doesn’t actually have any functional county governments at all, except for those that serve as geographic boundaries on maps. Even notwithstanding our concerns about the lack of knowledge about state and local government, it appears that civics education generally is in a state of disrepair. As the American Bar Association  wrote about 18 months ago, The “neglect of social studies and civics is directly linked to decades-long education policies at the state and federal levels mandating testing of basic literacy (English Language Arts and math) through funding incentives. Specifically, and as a direct consequence of education policy, civic education has been chronically underfunded, both federally and locally. Currently, the federal government invests a mere 5 cents per K–12 student compared to $54 per student for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).” So enjoy your fireworks and hotdogs, and maybe if you’re moved to do so, find yourself a young person and explain what it’s all about. #StateLocalCivicEducation #CivicLiteracy #CityGovernmentManagement #CountyGovernmentManagement #CountyIgnorance #July4Knowledge #CivicEducation #StateLocalEducationManagementandPolicy

We get a great deal of information from the Internet for our work, and there’s little question that the easy access to tons of reports, studies, surveys, legislation, audits, budgets, meeting minutes, essays, graphs, etc., has revolutionized research and reporting on all fronts, not just state and local government.   But, despite the benefits that online information can bring to researchers, reporters, academics and practitioners, there are a multitude of flaws in this seemingly endless source of facts, figures and history.   For example, we’re repeatedly frustrated by the absence of dates on website pages. For example, the website for the State of Texas offers a seemingly useful directory of government services , including  information about licensing, vital records and business resources. A terrific idea, but the website page has no date attached, and so we can’t figure out a way for residents to know if the information to which the webpage links is up to date.   Then there are scholarly reports that pop up when searching for information about a topic. Readers are often in the dark about the timing of these papers which leaves them unable to tell whether the information is current or not.   One more problem on the dating scene: Legislative websites should be a good way to keep track of current legislation in the states. But we repeatedly run across sites that aren’t nearly up to date. For example, in early June, the office of West Virginia Governor Jim Justice issued a release proclaiming that “Gov. Justice signs legislation providing more than $80 million for West Virginia’s college students and higher education institutions.” That’s pretty big news in West Virginia, but as of mid-June, the legislative site  hasn’t taken note. In fact, the most recent legislation listed there dates back to March. We understand, theoretically and from personal experience, that it can be very time-consuming keeping websites up to date. But if states like West Virginia are tracking legislation on their legislative sites, it doesn’t feel like it should be too much trouble keeping them up to date – or at least close. Yet one more frustration with websites is that the links they provide are frequently out of service. The Pew Research Center  recently issued a report that found that “ Overall, 21% of all the government webpages we examined contained at least one broken link. Across every level of government we looked at, there were broken links on at least 14% of pages; city government pages had the highest rates of broken links.” Keeping the links on a website entirely up to date is a hugely daunting task. In fact, we may well be in a glass house throwing stones in this case, as we’re confident that a close perusal of our own site has links that have long since expired. Sorry about that. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagemnt #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalGaovernment #StateandLocalGovernmentTransparency #TimelyGovernmentInformation #PewResearchCenter #BrokenStateLocalWebsiteLink #StateLocalGovernmentInformationSharing #GovernmentInternetFrustrations #InternetFrustrationStateLocalGovernment #InternetFrustrationPublicSector #StateLocalGovernmentWebsiteFlaw #BarrettandGreeneInc

Over more than 30 years of covering state and local government, we can’t recall ever talking to a public sector manager who loved going to meetings. They may occasionally enjoy them, and they know that they need them. But, on the whole, the complaint that we hear most frequently goes something like this: “I’m spending so much time in meetings that I can’t get my work done.”   Even in the day of remote work, when many participants can attend meetings virtually, there’s a multiplier factor here. Let’s say that a manager calls a meeting with seven supervisors for a two-hour session. That’s eight people, including the manager, times two hours or a total of sixteen hours — or two full days of work for one person. That doesn’t even count the amount of time people should be taking to prepare for the gathering, and the snarky texts that follow along complaining about the waste of time.   The following, based on a number of conversations we’ve had over the years (as well as a certain amount of personal experience), are nine ideas for making meetings more productive, and possibly cutting down on resentment at their very existence. 1.     Whoever is running the meeting should be there exactly when the meeting is supposed to start. In the old days (not so long ago, really), this was a syndrome of meetings where everyone gathered around a conference table. But it’s got a new wrinkle for virtual meetings, when online participants can sit around awaiting the person who can let them into the virtual meeting room.   2.     Somebody should be taking really good notes, and — without taking too much time — distributing them to the men and women who were in attendance afterwards, who can then share them with others who would benefit by knowing what went on. With the advent of electronic transcription technology, this needn’t be a burden. 3.     If you set a meeting for an hour, and it doesn’t need an hour, don’t wait for the Red Sea to part. Just let those people go. 4.     If you set a meeting for an hour, every effort should be taken to have it end at the hours end. This may require cutting off people who want to join in the discussion in a way that can be very wordy. 5.     If you ask the participants in a meeting to identify themselves, ask them to do so in 30 seconds or less. 6.     Meetings should end with some time to discuss “next steps,” so that attendees will feel like this session led someplace except to the graveyard of hours they’ll never see again. 7.     Make sure the people in the room all get an agenda in advance. And by in advance, we don’t mean an e-mail that pops up 10 minutes before the gathering begins. 8.     Don’t fall into the trap of believing that there’s infinite time for the meeting during the first third, moving along at a decent pace in the second third, and then rushing in the last third — which often is when the group is trying to come to some conclusions. 9.     Finally, in hybrid meetings, make certain that the virtual participants are included as thoroughly as the people in the room.   #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalHumanResources #StateandLocalBudgeting #CityandCountyManagement #StateGovernmentMeetingManagement #CityGovernmentMeetingManagement #CountyGovernmentMeetingManagement #StateandLocalTimeManagement #StateandLocalLeadership #StateandLocalWorkforce #GoverrnmentSupervisorTraining #B&GReport #BarrettandGreene

When we attend social gatherings like weddings and are seated with people who don’t know us, one of the obligatory first questions exchanged is “And what do you do for a living?”    Whatever our tablemates answer, we always seem to have tons of questions for them. But when we talk about our work in terms of “helping states and local governments to run better,” instead of being beset by queries, frequently the response ranges from a polite quizzical smile to outright laughter. Few questions follow. The very idea that states and localities can and do improve the way they deliver services seems to be a humorously implausible notion to these new acquaintances. We think that this phenomenon has just gotten worse. We read all kinds of local newspapers, in order to do our work, and there seems to be a sad consensus forming that governments are just growing steadily less capable of solving the hard problems. We’ve written a fair amount recently about the decline of trust in government  and we suspect that this point of view is largely responsible. Since most of the people reading this B&G Report work with states and localities, we may be preaching to the choir, but just in the last couple of months here are some examples of the way governments are making accomplishments that are worthy of note: In mid-May, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced  a 35% reduction in shootings and 37% decrease in gun-related deaths between 2021 and 2023. Data from the first four months of 2024 also show a 35% drop compared to the average number of shooting victims over the past five years. A Tulsa Oklahoma initiative called Women in Recovery works with the courts and local governments to create a national model to take women off the path to prison and onto a road to a fulfilling self-sufficient life.  A growing number of states  are adapting ways in which workplaces can adapt so that individuals with disabilities can thrive. A national movement led by sheriffs   has been growing education programs in jails, improving internal conditions and culture and reducing recidivism. We could go on and on. And that’s not because we see the world through rose-colored glasses. We see plenty of things that aren’t heading in the right direction. It’s just that we care about solutions as much as we care about problems. Clearly, the increasingly partisan nature of government has provided another cause for doubt in governments’ capacity to solve problems. Let’s say that General Motors ran a series of ads claiming that Ford cars were likely to explode; and Ford ran its own series of ads claiming that General Motors vehicles had brakes that were defective. Nobody would be inclined to buy either brand. We think that’s very much the way things are working as people running for elective office run attack ads come election season. And the hyper-partisan world of the federal government has trickled down, like acid rain, on the governments of counties, cities and states. As long as there’s an insistent drumbeat about the perceived failures of previous administrations, how can anyone expect people to think that new administrations will be any better? Another factor contributing to the suspicion about the capacity of government to improve lives is that there’s been a trend to want quick solutions to long-standing problems. But overnight solutions to problems like homelessness, flaws in policing, or unsafe bridges just don’t exist. Patience is key. We’ve devoted our careers observing state and local government to exploring the incremental changes that can lead to major advances. For example, we’ve written extensively about the need for better data upon which to make decisions.  Right now, we’re working on developing a webinar – a joint venture between the American Society for Public Administration’s H. George Fredrickson Center for Social Equity and its Center for Performance and Accountability – about the use of data to help provide the tools necessary to develop a more equitable nation. But while we think that event will help provide information that will help cities and states to see their way to more equity, we know that one little webinar isn’t going to change the world. It’s just a small step in the process. But we feel confident that armed with appropriate information, progress can be made, not just in trying to create a more equitable nation, but in dealing with a whole host of problems that beset us. And that’s why we do what we do. Any questions? #DedicatedToStateandLocalGovernment #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalPublicAdministration #StateandLocalDataGovernance #StateEquityandDEIPolicyandManagement #CityGovernmentPerformance #CityGovernmentManagement #CountyGovernmentManagement #StateEquityandDEIPolicyandManagement #CityEquityandDEIPolicyandManagement #StateLocalPolicyImplementation #AmericanSocietyForPublicAdministration #ASPA #HGeorgeFredericksonCenterforSocialEquity #CenterforAccountabilityandPerformance #CityandStateInnovation #StateandLocalEvidenceBasedPractice #StateandLocalEvaluation #B&GReport #BarrettandGreeneInc