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This is the time of year when the days are at their shortest, the thermometer may dip below freezing, the stores are crowded with shoppers and publications are full of predictions for 2024. We thought we’d join the pack and offer up seven forecasts for the world of state and local management in the months to come. If you have any to add, please send them our way at greenebarrett@gmail.com. 1)    Whatever states and local governments choose to do about remote work – including hybrid work -- there’s going to be growing pushback from at least part of the staff. Settle on a requirement for three days in the office and people will want two. Cut back to two days and there’ll be complaints about the lack of socialization in an office that’s nearly empty. And whatever days you pick for staffers to come in they’ll be inconvenient for many. Figuring out this riddle is going to be a huge task for HR offices from coast to coast. 2)    As the American Rescue Plan Act money comes closer to running out, states that decided to cut back on taxes are going to begin to regret their actions – particularly if citizens get wind of the idea that services may be diminished in months or years to come. 3)    Though AI is going to keep advancing, and no one will know the outcomes for some time, the good news about its capacities is going to begin to outweigh the terrifying specters of the way it’s going to take over planet earth like some creature from outer space. 4)    The number of “chief officer” positions will continue to grow, following on the trend to appoint “chief sustainability officers” and “chief heat officers.” Many won’t be given enough money or staff to do their jobs. 5)    We don’t dabble in politics, but this felt worth saying: Whatever the pollsters say, most are going to be wrong. 6)    Ransomware attacks – already at peak levels – are going to accelerate even more as the bad guys get richer and cities (especially small ones) still won’t have sufficient resources to stop them. 7)    (Here’s an easy one) There’s going to be more than one natural disaster someplace, which will be followed by a resounding chorus of voices asking why the entity wasn’t prepared.

At the end of November, a survey was released that investigated how local government finance leaders feel about their current budgeting practices and their readiness to embrace modernized approaches. It was conducted by Polco, a community engagement and civic analytics govtech company, in partnership with the Government Finance Officers Association, with collaboration from Envisio, a maker of government planning software, and Euna Solutions, a creator of budgeting software. The 285 respondents were either directly responsible for the budget (77%), part of the budget team (15%) or staff members who oversaw the budget department (12%). Respondents were asked to rate their current budget methodology based on 15 budget quality characteristics, with ratings ranging from 100 (excellent) to 0 (poor.) One cautionary note, according to the report which was titled Rethinking Budgeting: Results from the Local Government Budget Survey. “These results come from higher performing organizations based on surveying GFOA’s distinguished budget award winners. Results from local government budgeting in general, would likely show less innovative practices.” While the survey found that local governments are inclined to take into account the priorities of elected officials and staff, when it comes to listening to residents, the results were somewhat bleaker. As Michelle Kobayashi, principal research strategist with Polco told us in a conversation last week, “Traditionally, it's been difficult to incorporate stakeholder opinion in the budget process and this study confirmed that.” A few of the findings that buttress that point: ·        When respondents were asked “how would you rate your current budget methodology/process on incorporating residents,” only 41 percent indicated it was excellent or good. ·        Insofar as allowing residents to help in the decision-making process, taking into account important tradeoffs, the numbers were even worse, with only 21 percent saying that was excellent or good. ·        In terms of building trust with residents, 48 percent said their entities were doing a good or excellent job. The study also examined the degree to which decisions were data driven and focused on results and outcomes. When asked “how would you rate your current budget methodology/process insofar as focusing on the outcomes or results delivered by government activity,” 56 percent said it was excellent or good. When respondents were asked how well they integrated with their organization wide strategic plan, 61 percent said the effort was excellent or good. As Kobayashi told us, “Focusing on inputs rather than outcomes makes the budget less interesting to external stakeholders, and also makes collaboration a greater challenge. . .  Again, this area did not score well in the assessment and many organizations would benefit by incorporating a stronger focus on results in their processes. This is a really good way to make budgets more actionable.” A third major take-away from the survey, reported Kobayashi, was that there’s a lack of transparency in the budget process and document itself. “That’s another area, that we scored very low,” she said. “There are mandates on public information sharing around the budget – host a meeting and let residents respond – but the organizations were weaker at disseminating information in a way that helps constituents understand how you’re spending the money and why you’re spending the money.” Armed with the information gathered in the survey, the Government Finance Officers Association will release a self-guided tool to help individual entities assess how well they’re doing in the various areas covered by the study. The tool was created by the same group that launched the survey, with particular support from Kobayashi and her data science team. The goal would be to use it as a guide for a gathering of staff, elected officials, residents and other stakeholders to talk about how well the budget process serves them in a variety of vital areas. Kobayashi: “They can use the tool to assess their current budget status and brainstorm things like how well we are doing in terms of say, welcoming residents into this process and what can we do better? At the end of this assessment, the group would then decide if there were areas where they could move forward. It might be focusing on outcomes, participatory budgeting or readiness to train staff on new technology. And then GFOA could provide them resources to help them move forward in these areas.” The ten different dimensions of the readiness assessment include: ·  Alignment with strategic plan and/or current organizational priorities ·  A results/outcome orientation ·  Collaboration across departments ·  Collaboration with elected officials ·  Constituent engagement ·  Transparency and opportunities to build trust ·  Change management ·  Empowered budget staff ·  Dedication to human capital/staff training ·  The use of integrated, agile technology Naturally this process won’t change things overnight. “You find two or three top areas you can work on,” says Kobayashi, “and not overwhelm people with the process of change, so that overall, you’re evolving over time.”

A few weeks ago, we wrote an item for this website about the executive orders that were pouring out of the offices of the nine most recently elected governors. One of our findings was that “New task forces, study groups and advisory bodies were a dominant theme.” That discovery led us to think about the many task forces we’ve seen established over the course of years. Some have certainly led to the kind of information necessary to implement a new policy. But all too many have been the governmental equivalent of treading water, exhausting time and resources while moving no place forward. As John Bartle, dean of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, wrote to us when we reached out to him for his thoughts, “From what I have seen in state government (not universities), some task forces are created as a way to make it appear as if there is a response to a political demand, with no real intention of making any progress.” We agree with Bartle’s comment, and take note that he’s only referring to “some” task forces. We're aware of many cases in which task forces are established with only the best of intentions. As Mark Funkhouser, President of Funkhouser & Associates, and former Mayor and Auditor of Kansas City Missouri told us, “Task forces can be useful when there is a policy question that must be answered and is outside or beyond the purview of the normal policy making process. Task forces work best when they are staffed by professionals with deep expertise in the area considered and those staff are empowered to bring well developed solutions to the problems being considered.” One task force currently operating is The Governor’s Commission on the Future of Health Care in New York State a hugely ambitious undertaking. We contacted Patrick Orecki, director of State Studies at the Citizen Budget Commission to see what he had to say about it and here’s what he told us “We certainly think the task force is a good step. We've been calling for a permanent such body put in law, along with vastly improved data reporting for Medicaid. The trouble with the task force, currently, is that its mandate is largely undefined, and it is an entirely administrative function. Between those two facts, it seems like it could fall short and just be window dressing like other task forces before it.” So, then what makes for a successful task force that leads a promising policy on a clear path toward implementation? Tim Maniccia, Chief Fiscal Officer and Treasurer at Hudson River-Black River Regulating District had some rules of thumb for us. He believes that a successful task force should: · Have clear desired outcome and measures of success; · Secure commitment from organizers to go where the evidence leads; · Appoint a small number of knowledgeable, dedicated people; · Be sufficiently resourced and supported · Be time limited, with opportunity to extend if preliminary findings yield other important questions that can be answered. Without most of these elements in place task forces can follow the path described by an article in Fast Money, headlined “The First Effort to Regulate AI was a Spectacular Failure.” It described in 2019 the efforts made for the New York City Automated Decisions Task Force, and explained that “Excitingly, this was the first task force in the country to comprehensively analyze the impact of artificial intelligence on government. Looking at everything from predictive policing, to school assignments, to trash pickup, the people in this room were going to decide what role AI should play and what safeguards we should have. “But that’s not what happened. “Flash forward 18 months and the end of the process couldn’t be more dissimilar from its start. The nervous energy had been replaced with exhaustion. Our optimism that we’d be able to provide an outline for the ways that the New York City government should be using automated decision systems gave way to a fatalistic belief that we may not be able to tackle a problem this big after all.” This was certainly an extreme case, but it’s a path that any significant task force can take unless it’s carefully planned for, established and utilized. #GovernorExecutiveOrders #StateGovernmentTaskForce #CityGovernmentTaskForce #StateGovernmentStudyGroup #Funkhouser&Associates #CollegeofPublicAffairsandCommunityServiceUofNebraska #Governor'sCommissionontheFutureofHealthCare #CitizenBudgetCommission #AITaskForce #NewYorkCityAutomatedDecisionsTaskForce #TaskForceDisillusionment #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #ArtificialIntelligenceRegulation #ArtificialIntelligenceinStateandLocalGovernment #B&GReport

Over the last few years, a whole bundle of things that happened in the state and local government world were attributed in some way to the pandemic. To be sure, the devastating impact of COVID has found its way into many corners of our lives. But just because a shift in major societal trends occurred during or after the pandemic, that doesn’t mean that one was the cause of the other, despite what you may read elsewhere. We spoke with Stefaan Verhulst a professor at the NYU Center for Urban Science, and co-founder of the GovLab at NYU, about this. He’s one of the most data-savvy people we’ve ever met, and here’s what he had to say: “"The pandemic is now frequently attributed as the explanation for various trends. It has become a dominant variable in interpretations of contemporary phenomena. However, it's important to consider that observing a spike during the pandemic might indicate a correlation rather than a direct causation.” As many readers of the B&G Report doubtless know, confusing two events that happen simultaneously (correlation) with one event that causes the other (causation) can lead to all sorts of false conclusions. As the extensively published physician Frank Messerli wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine over a decade ago, it’s possible to find a correlation between chocolate consumption by country and the number of Nobel laureates. It seems intuitively clear that Hershey Bars aren’t the key to genius, and he wrote his piece as a caution to scientists about jumping to false conclusions based on correlation data. Here’s a powerful example of this kind of flawed thinking from Verhulst: “Consider remote working,” he said. “If you look at productivity lines, they have been going down for fifty years and it’s been a trend not just because of the remote work that was the result of the pandemic. But there were all kinds of assumptions made despite the fact that there was very little causation between whether people worked remotely or not and their productivity.” This is an easy trap to fall into, and in the years when we worked as consultants to the Pew Charitable Trusts we became accustomed to the careful analysis that went into avoiding confusing correlations with causations. We just wish that others did the same. #stateandlocalmanagement #pandemic #covid #data #StefaanVerhulst #JAMA #NewEnglandJournalofMedicine #causation #correlation #NYU

Our late friend and colleague Harry Hatry long insisted that data is far more valuable when it’s disaggregated. In a January 2022 paper for the Urban Institute, which we were honored to co-author with him, he maintained that performance data is particularly useful when you “compare the outcome values broken out (disaggregated) by demographic characteristics (e.g., by age group, race/ethnicity, gender, education level, and location—such as neighborhood, state, or other geographical location).” Over the course of years, we have grown to believe that Hatry's point is not just sensible, it's absolutely critical to manage a vastly complex nation. We've grown increasingly frustrated, for example, at the broad descriptions of states as red or blue. Texas is almost always described as a red state. But according to NBC Affiliate, KXAN, "Four . . . counties have given Democrats an average margin of victory of more than 30 percentage points: Travis, Presidio, El Paso and Webb. Of counties with more than 100,000 registered voters, Travis County, home to Austin, gives Democrats the most support, with an average margin of victory of 41.71 percentage points." The need to politically disaggregate is only the most obvious example. The attraction of any one-size-fits all managerial solution is headed in the wrong direction (at least for some places). Dealing with the housing crisis in big cities is an entirely different matter than doing the same thing in rural America for example. As a result, states that try to come up with solutions that will work equally well in both kinds of localities are likely going to fail one or the other (or maybe even both). Michael Jacobson, director of Performance and Strategy at the King County Office of Performance Strategy and Budgets put the matter eloquently when he pointed us some time ago to adage he had once heard: "Aggregate to communicate and disaggregate to manage." These lessons are brought into stark relief by a report by the Census Bureau that stops us from ever thinking that the median population of states is a truly meaningful figure. The title of the report gets right to the point: "New Census Bureau Visualization Shows Broad Variations in Age." Consider Florida. Its median age in 2021 was 42.7, somewhat higher than next-door neighbor Georgia with a median age of 37.5. But does this mean that all of Florida is a place where retirees tend to go for low taxes and sunny weather? Not really, if you visit Leon County, with a population approaching 300,000. That county, home to the state capital, appropriately named for explorer Ponce de Leon, who is said to have sought the Fountain of Youth, has a median age of 32.1. By wild contrast, Sumter County, Florida, has a median age of 68.3, the highest of any county in the country. No surprise there. Sumter County is effectively little more than the home of The Villages, a master-planned age-restricted community with 130,000 people and virtually no children. Florida is not unusual, as the Census Bureau points out. Median ages ranged from county to county in practically every state. South Dakota, for example, had an extremely low median age of 23.0 in tiny Todd County, primarily home to Native Americans compared to 56.3 in Custer County. These age ranges are of consequence for a number of reasons. For example, when states distribute finances to counties based on their total populations, it might be wise for them to take the individual counties’ median ages into account. Consider the funding that went out to counties to help them deal with Covid vaccinations, particularly in the early days of the pandemic. Given the greater likelihood of hospitalizations and deaths among older people, it would have made simple sense to look at these disaggregated figures and spend more in the counties with higher median ages. Lumping people together into any monolith is often misleading, and age is only one example. Consider the words of Laura Zhang Choi, a Warren County school-board member who testified to New Jersey legislators that the state would be well served by breaking down the component parts of New Jersey’s Asian American residents, according to an article in Verve Times. She pointed the legislators to New York City as a powerful example, and according to the article she told the legislators that, “about 11% of city residents suffer from diabetes, and the rate among Asian Americans is roughly the same at 12%. But a deeper look showed an alarming figure for Indian Americans, nearly double the city average at 21%. That information disappeared when all Asian ethnicities were lumped together.” The importance of disaggregation – for many other factors – was clearly spelled out in a podcast featuring Amy O’Hara, Research Professor in the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. As she explained, “When we think about the way that our communities are reflected in data, the biggest regular data collection is a decennial census. Every 10 years information is pulled together about every single resident in the United States. And for that information, in order to do apportionment, you say, how many humans are there in the U.S. and that’s adequate for that purpose. “But then, you really want to start breaking it down. What are the characteristics of these people? How many are male? How many are female? How many are old? How many are young? And you get these disaggregations of the data that were collected. The aggregate information is useful, but depending on what your policy question is, it’s not going to be useful enough.” #PerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernment #Equity #PublicSectorData #CityandCountyManagement #PerformanceMeasurement #DisaggregatedData #MichaelJaccobson #KingCounty #Disaggregation #UrbanInstitute #Covid #CensusBureau #PerformanceData #DataDisaggregation #KingCountyOfficeofPerformanceandStrategy #DataVisualization #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement#McCourtSchoolofPublicPolicy

We are puzzled and frustrated with the ignorance of many people about the importance of state and local government management. They tend to be acutely aware of the politics in the places where they live. And many have strong opinions about policies of all sorts that directly affect them. But when we bring up management, we frequently get the kind of look you’d anticipate seeing on the face of someone confronted with a detailed explanation of quantum physics. These aren’t uneducated folks we’re complaining about. In fact, we’re acutely aware of this phenomenon based on conversations with friends and family (among whom are doctors, teachers, lawyers, professors, and accountants). It recently came as a surprise to us when we were showing this website to someone who has been a mental health counselor for years. She’s a friend, and so made an effort to kindly express some interest. But then she made it clear that, since it was about government, it had nothing important to do with her life. We persuaded her (at least for the moment) that states and localities had a great deal to do with mental health care. (In fact, at this very moment we’re writing a column for Route Fifty about this very topic). We know we’re not the only ones who are aware of this phenomenon. Over the last 30-plus years, we’ve become aware of a secret weapon we have when interviewing people about their work in government management: they’re hungry for someone who genuinely cares about what they do for a living, because they don’t get that from their friends and neighbors, and even their spouses, parents and adult children. Think about the public sector folks who refer to themselves as “policy wonks” or “policy nerds.” At least they tend to use these potentially pejorative terms with a tone of pride. People who implement those policies don’t even have a supposed-to-be-funny way of describing themselves altogether. All of this is really a pity, especially at a time when trust in government is waning in large part because of the poisoned seeds of partisan politics. It would be nice, indeed, if more people saw work done by diligent public employees to make sure that they get the services they rely on for safety, transportation, health care, economic development, and much, much more. #stateandlocalmanagement #RouteFifty #stateandlocalgovernment #stateandlocalgovernmentmanagement #barrettandgreene

Over the course of the last few months, we’ve been digging deeply into the world of tax incentives given by states and local governments to help encourage economic development. And we’ve emerged with a sense of frustration with many of the nation’s elected officials who boast to the public about businesses they’ve attracted with incentives even when there’s ample evidence that, for the most part, they aren’t the real motivation for corporate site decisions. We can’t tell for sure whether the politicians genuinely know that their boasts are based on unrealistic assumptions. But they should. For columns about various elements of the topic for Route Fifty and the GFOA’s Government Finance Review, and a Q&A for the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, we interviewed many of the leading authorities about the topic along the way, including Nathan Jensen, a professor in the department of government at the University of Texas Austin; Timothy Bartik, senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; Shayne Kavanagh, senior manager of research for the Government Finance Officers Association; Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First; David Brunori, visiting professor of public policy at George Mason University; Ellen Harpel founder of Smart Incentives and others. The evidence and commentary provided by these experts points clearly to the idea that a relatively small portion of the money that goes to tax incentives truly attracts or retains jobs in individual cities or states. And yet, many elected officials seem addicted to the pleasure of issuing press releases and giving speeches that claim to the public that the latest big economic development coup has come to pass because of their clever use of tax breaks. It’s no surprise that people who run for office would want to boast to taxpayers about their roles in attracting new jobs (or at least the potential of new jobs in the future). But the real reasons behind most economic development deals aren’t things for which they can take credit. An educated workforce, for one, is something that takes years to accumulate, and rarely can a single elected official lay claim to its development. Ironically, it may even be that when money is going to tax incentives it’s being diverted from spending on education, which would, indeed, have better results when it comes to bringing in or retaining corporations. There’s more. When elected officials are pushing for tax incentives in order to get votes, they may be disinclined to utilize these tools for the distressed parts of cities that need them the most. As Timothy Bartik, one of the most respected researchers in this field told us “There’s a tendency to send dollars to places that are already growing.” We’ve been researching state and local governments for long enough that this state of affairs shouldn’t come as a surprise. But it’s particularly ironic, we think, that in a day when there’s growing emphasis on supporting policies only when they can be demonstrated as effective through real-world evidence, this is an expensive area in which evidence is routinely cast aside in favor of political considerations. #taxincentives #taxbreaks #politics #RouteFifty #taxpolicy #stateandlocaltaxes #economicdevelopment #NathanJensen #TimothyBartik #davidbrunori #EllenHarpel #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #stateandlocalmanagent #gregleroy #ShayneKavanagh

We’d probably be the subject of justifiable ridicule if we were to come out against the notion of work life balance in the public sector workforce. The very notion that state and local employees should be able to balance dedication to their jobs with time enough for friends, family and pleasurable activities is nothing short of good common sense and is a major attraction for potential new employees. Yet, in recent months as we’ve chatted with a number of managers, we seem to be running across a phenomenon that – taken to its extremes – can be debilitating to their lives. It’s pretty simple. When employees are overly focused on a definition of work-life balance that tips too far in the direction of life and away from work, somebody has to pick up the slack. Not to knock members of the GenZ generation, but lately we’ve been hearing a fair number of middle manager – even middle managers in their thirties -- grousing about the extra work they’re doing because younger employees feel free to say no. As generational expert Kristin Scroggin told us recently, “I think social media has given them the idea that there can be this perfect life – that there’s a place where you can work when you want to, and only work in a job where you’re happy and fulfilled all the time. And if you’re not happy you should leave.” This issue is particularly pressing at a time when state and local governments are struggling to hire and retain enough good employees to do necessary work. As Mission Square Research Institute reported a few months ago, “State and local governments continue to face severe labor shortages . . .” Certainly, the absence of enough workers is putting great pressure on employees at all levels. Another Mission Square Report found 77 percent of respondents felt that the increase in workers leaving their jobs was putting a strain on their own workloads. Last summer, we wrote a report about the problem of workplace fatigue. Most of it was focused on shift workers who are paid time and a half for overtime. But fatigue, we learned, was also a major issue for exempt employees who aren’t eligible for overtime. Faced with labor shortages, they end up taking on more work themselves. “There’s a level of middle management that just absorbs the work because they can’t necessarily ask their employees to do overtime,” said Janeen Haller-Abernathy, who runs the internal Employee Assistance Program in Colorado. “It’s almost like the workload has moved up the chain instead of down the chain.” To make matter worse, at a time like this, it can be nearly impossible for a supervisor to get to be too harsh when employees insist that they have already put in their 35-hour week, and so they’re going home regardless of whether their work has been completed. As the old saying goes, “People don’t leave jobs, they leave supervisors,” and a supervisor who seems to be too pushy may be just the kind of person who drives away the workers they’ve been struggling to attract. It’s part of the American dream that if you work long enough and hard enough, eventually, you’ll reach a point where the drudge work falls to the people who report to you. If they can’t or won’t do it, though, then the dream can turn into a nightmare. Typically, we like to write columns that have a happy ending, loaded with solutions that others can use. But this is an instance in which the only solution we can see is one we don’t want to see – and that’s an escalating unemployment rate, where younger staffers are happy just to have a job and are less inclined to let their work get done by the people who hired them. #stateandlocalmanagement #stateandlocalgovernmenthumanresources #humanresources #Colorado #workplacefatigue #kristinscroggin #worklifebalance #GenerationZ

How many times have you read articles that refer to “cities and states,’ as though those two entities cover the waterfront for the broader term “local government”? Often, we’ll bet. But whenever we see references like that, we immediately wonder, “what happened to the counties?” There are over 3,000 counties (or so-called county-equivalents) in the United States with some 3.6 million employees, and they are at the center of many of the functions that Americans think of as government roles, just beginning with courts, jails, health care, education, transportation and human services. They range in size from itty-bitty ones like Loving County Texas with a population of 64 to Los Angeles County California with almost 10 million residents (that’s more people than in the ten smallest states combined). 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 counties at all, except for those that serve as geographic boundaries on maps. We became even more acutely aware of just how much counties could be the center of a pressing issue, yet still kept out of the loop when we co-authored a white paper with Don Kettl for the IBM Center for the Business of Government. As we wrote, “Though counties represent the level of government that tends to get the least attention, they have historically served as the cornerstones of health policies, including immunizations that keep diseases like diphtheria, pertussis, and measles at bay. Yet when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a playbook to guide vaccination distribution in October of 2020, counties barely received a mention. “Not only did the federal government fail to communicate effectively with the counties, but the states often lacked similar actions. This left many counties swimming upstream as the (vaccine) rollout began to move forward.” With all this in mind, we were particularly eager to read a new book that has just come out called Governing on the Ground: The Past Present, and Future of County Governments that helps put the importance of counties into perspective through a series of essays by people who make the counties work. The essays, written in first person, give readers some perspective about the heroics and heartbreaks of county leaders from coast to coast. Typical is the moving story of Douglas County Nebraska Commissioner Mary Ann Borgeson who was put in the painful position of becoming a caretaker to a mother with Alzheimer’s disease and a father who was diagnosed with cancer. “It was a grueling schedule,” she writes, “because I was also looking after my husband who was being treated for cancer. Sometimes, my husband and Daddy were at the infusion center together, not a family outing I’d wish on anyone.” She writes about her efforts in Douglas County to help others who were in similar positions, by trying to ensure that there were enough people to serve in positions as “drivers, home-health aides, housekeeping, you name it. . . “ The county couldn’t turn its back, and so, she writes, “We just looked for new ways to provide the services and made sure our elderly received their food deliveries and medications. For doctors’ visits, we used telemedicine, and to see how our residents were faring we checked in via Zoom. Technology, while not a solution to the staffing shortages, improved our outreach. Communication is key to accomplishing this. You have to make certain that you are providing the services people want and need. You also have to stay in touch with the private providers to find out where they are running into trouble, and with your state and federal delegations to see that you have the funds to pay the providers.” This is only the beginning of the work that Douglas County does to help serve its older residents, and like many of the other essayists in the book, Borgeson tells the story well, and with humanity. As Matthew Chase, CEO and executive director of the National Association of Counties wrote in the forward, “County leaders are on the front lines. When a road needs repaving, a family member overdoses from a fentanyl-laced substance or nursing-home patients are overwhelmed by COVID-19 residents expect results. They care about their potholed ruined tires or whether their loved ones will survive the virus. End of story. No debate about it.”

While we generally write about the use of performance measurements in the realm of state and local government, lessons can be learned about their use – and their potential flaws – from a wide variety of sources, including major league baseball. Over the last twenty years or so, baseball managers have become increasingly convinced that, rather than trust their instincts, they should rely on reams of data that are supposed to help them to improve fielding and hitting in a variety of ways. The practice was jettisoned into public’s awareness when Author Michael Lewis wrote his bestselling book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” It showed how the Oakland Athletics had used data to put together a strong team, even though it had one of the smallest payrolls in the sport at the time. Baseball, which has long been a sport full of statistics, seemed like the ideal environment for such a movement just as government (which also thrives on data) is a place where metrics can be powerful tools. But beyond the common sense of the issue, there are some, in both government and baseball, who feel this reliance can have some downsides, as a recent article in the New York Times pointed out when it quoted record-holding slugger Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees. The Times reported that “he believes data can ultimately be manipulated to have whatever desired outcome a party is looking for.” Clearly most data aren’t being misused in this way, but Judge makes a good cautionary point for both baseball and government. The Yankee was quoted saying, “We get a lot of numbers, but I think we might be looking at the wrong ones and maybe should value some other ones that some people might see as having no value.” Another good point for both baseball and government. Some players told the Times that the over-reliance on data had the perverse effect of removing reliance on instincts that could be beneficial to a player’s game. Reported the newspaper, one player indicated that “there were numerous voices in his ear earlier in the season and it messed with his swing because of all the tinkering the numbers were suggesting.” Here, too, we can see how government managers might learn something from the comments of these professional athletes. When government employees are inundated with data to rule the way they do their jobs, there can easily be a tendency to believe that their managers already know all the answers, and there’s little need to consider their own instincts. That kind of attitude can rob an organization of the insights that employees might have – beyond those reasons that are based in the analytics. And that’s not a good thing.

Last summer, we wrote a report for UKG about the increasingly onerous issue of state and local employees who -- for a variety of reasons -- are thoroughly worn out, a situation which can result in a variety of problems, including unplanned and unexplained absences, risks to worker safety, drops in performance, and declining levels of customer satisfaction. You can download the full report by clicking here. The issues of workplace fatigue haven't become any less important since the release of the report. Heightened turnover in recent years, hiring difficulties, stress, and an onslaught of overtime requirements, mean that more and more public sector workers are experiencing its sometimes dangerous consequences. As a result, public sector managers are becoming more attuned to the issue and are looking for ways to address its root causes. "Increasingly, both public and private sector organizations are pinpointing a range of negative impacts on workers who aren’t getting enough rest. . . “If an employee is fatigued, productivity will go down. You have a greater chance of mistakes at work and a greater chance of someone hurting themselves,” says Talona Felix, UKG workforce business consultant. "There’s something of a chicken and egg syndrome here. For individuals who work in 24-7 operations – which include a great many government functions that must run around the clock ‒ fatigue and related burnout increase retention problems, which then puts more pressure on remaining staff. “Every day we would lose more people than we could hire and a lot of it was just because our staff burned out,” says Betsy Thomas, director of human resources at the Georgia Department of Corrections. In exit surveys, held when individuals left their jobs, the department heard two major complaints. One focused on their relationship with supervisors and the other was that they were not able to take enough days off. "Though issues of fatigue are gaining increased and merited attention in recent years, as far back as 2000, Dr. Bryan Vila authored a book called Tired Cops, written under a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. In it, he contended that “police managers and leaders need to develop work-hour standards and procedures to minimize fatigue and ensure alertness, develop and implement thorough fatigue management plans, establish permanent employee/manager fatigue task forces to monitor compliance with related policies and regulations, and identify new problems and opportunities for ensuring officer alertness on the job,” according to a DOJ synopsis. . . "The degree to which people aren’t able to get enough sleep has been increasing. In a nine-year study of self-reports of sleep duration from the National Health Interview Survey, Ball State University analyzed sleep duration for 150,000 working adults and found that the number who got seven hours of sleep or less had increased from 30.9% in 2010 to 35.6% in 2018. "That study found that poor sleep quality was particularly common in a number of professions that are part of the public sector, including healthcare, protective services, and transportation. "Studies of police officers, for example, have shown that a high level of stress makes the fatigue the officers face from other factors even more acute. Problems can be particularly vexing for individual employees whose work hours vastly exceed the norm. "By examining the data, Felix has found extreme examples of employees who work many consecutive days without a break — such as one worker who put in a numbingly high 265 days on the job without a single holiday or weekend off. Though this is certainly extreme, her study of workplace data reveals plentiful instances of public sector employees who work long shifts and come back seven hours later to begin again. “If you only take seven hours between shifts, how do you get enough sleep and then also attend to the other aspects of life — eating, having time with family, sleeping, and hopefully showering?” she asks." #StateandLocalHumanResources #HumanResources #WorkplaceFatigue #StateandLocalGovernment #StateandLocalOvertime #Overtime #StateandLocalData #UKG

In the June issue of Government Finance Review, we have a column titled “Are Tax Incentives Good for Cities and States?” Though the headline, which we wrote, leaves the question pretty much open, readers of the piece will discover that based on a number of interviews, we discovered that the answer is pretty much “no.” To sum up, in the words of Shayne Kavanagh, senior manager of research at GFOA’s Research and Consulting Center, “There is compelling evidence that these things are often not effective.” With that in mind, we were intrigued to read an excellent report that came out last week from the Citizen’s Budget Commission, a nonprofit civic organization that focuses on the finance and services of New York City and New York state government. It was titled 11 Billion Reasons to Rethink New York’s Increasing Economic Development Spending. The 11 billion in the title referred to the total dollars spent on economic development in New York’s state and local governments – a number that the report indicates “likely will increase more in the coming years, potentially exceeding $13 billion in 2025.” Though the report focuses on New York, we know that its basic conclusion is true in many other places: There’s insufficient evidence that this spending is effective. As the report states, “Despite improved disclosure about individual projects, state and local economic development spending continues to increase without sufficient evidence that these programs cost-effectively create jobs or are more beneficial than alternative uses of the funds.” The report calls for data-driven evaluations about the effectiveness of incentives and grant programs and we agree entirely. But there may well be political reasons why such research isn’t done, not the least of which is that elected officials can get lots of mileage out of announcing major economic development initiatives, and they may not want to know exactly how well they’ve panned out. As we wrote in Government Finance Review, “It’s difficult for elected officials to take credit for many of the things that genuinely attract new businesses, like good education systems, a willing workforce, local amenities like golf courses and, naturally the weather. Even the most hyperbolically inclined politician in the world can’t take credit for blue skies and a temperate climate.” It feels like this may be a good time for greater demand for accountability when it comes to economic development spending. Increasingly, governments – both in legislative and executive branches – are demanding evidence that new programs work before they fund them. Indeed, the federal government has been pushing for evidence. According to a White House statement, “Since its first week in office, the Biden-Harris Administration has prioritized evidence-based decisions rooted in the best available science and data.” Getting back to the CBC report, three of its recommendations for New York State and its localities are that they “Rigorously evaluate existing incentives and programs to determine their effectiveness; Narrow, shrink, or eliminate programs that are not proven effective; and Adopt performance-based incentives whenever possible.” Sure make sense to us. #StateandLocalGovernment #StateandLocalManagement #StateanLocalGovernmentData #Data #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #EconomicDevelopment #CBC #NewYorkState #NewYorkCity