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  • Auditors tackle police-community relations

    We’ve recently seen a spate of local government audits that look at ways to stop negative police-community events before they happen. A sampling: In Washingon’s King County, the auditor noted that in the last five years, the county has paid $21 million in legal claims that are linked to Sheriff Office actions. Ideally, the county’s early intervention system, which seeks to improve officer performance, would seem to be a way to reduce law enforcement-community tensions.  But the audit, released at the end of January, found the program falls short of reaching its potential. Some problems cited: The period used to track “concerning behavior” is too short – just 90 days, whereas best practices suggest a much longer look-back period would be better. In addition, alerts of problematic behavior have been handled inconsistently by commanding officers, with some of the potentially useful information collected by the system going unused. In December, the Lawrence, KS, city auditor looked at the response of law enforcement to individuals with mental illness – a topic that is often in the headlines in many cities and counties around the country. The auditor’s recommendations are geared to helping the city’s new mental health squad do the best job it can in improving interactions between law enforcement and individuals with mental illness. The audit has generally positive comments to make about the city’s plans, but notes that clearer delineation of goals and objectives would be helpful and that the city could use a more comprehensive process for collecting and evaluating data about encounters. (This is a refrain we hear all the time, by the way.) Plans call for greater collaboration with city agencies that provide mental health services, but, as the audit says, “capacity for providing treatment and services remains uncertain.” Several months earlier, in September, 2016, the Austin city auditor looked into the process that’s in place to handle citizen complaints about their interaction with police. The audit found barriers to filing complaints and inconsistency in the way they’re handled. “These issues may lead to a more negative perception of law enforcement and erode the public trust,” auditors said. The city’s Office of the Police Monitor, which was set up about 15 years ago, is designed to “promote mutual respect between the Austin Police Department and the community it serves,” but the audit noted that its ability to provide oversight of the complaint process is limited. The audit has many separate recommendations directed at the Police Monitor, the Chief of Police and the City Manager. These recommendations include calls for better oversight, better communication to the public, increased staff knowledge about handling complaints and improvements in data collection. In addition, the San Jose Independent Police Auditor, along with the Mayor and other city officials and business CEOs, held a forum in late January to launch an 18-month campaign “to develop greater trust and better partnerships between law enforcement and San José residents in order to achieve a safer community.” A plea to state and local government auditors: If you have audits coming up on the important topic of police-community relations, or would like us to feature audits that we missed, please let us know!

  • Succession Planning: The Challenges

    A little while ago, we wrote a column for Governing magazine about succession planning. The thrust of our work was that only a small fraction of governmental entities are sufficiently prepared to replace employees from within when they quit or retire – and that those that do tend to see very positive results. We were grateful to receive a note from Ted Zaleski, the Director of Management and Budget in Carroll County, Maryland, which has a population of about 170,000 according to the 2010 census, and adjoins Baltimore County. As he wrote, it’s “pretty hard to argue against succession planning though there is a case to be made for ‘new blood’. I think most local governments would think good succession planning would be desirable.” But then Zaleski went on to write that “implementation can be difficult,” and provided a list of some things that can get in the way: No candidate. You can have a perfectly competent staff without anyone being right for the next job. Uncertain need. We will all need to be replaced someday, but when is more certain in some situations than others. Other opportunities. People who want to move up might not stick around until the opportunity opens where they are. Unhappiness with the current arrangement. I can think of people who were great candidates to move up, but left because they didn’t want to work for the person in the position. No interest. Sometimes an attractive candidate doesn’t want the job. Sometimes the pay increase often doesn’t seem worth the extra headaches, especially if you become an at-will employee.

  • “Just a citizen?” Arggggh.

    We’ve got credentials coming out of our ears. And we don’t hesitate to use them in order to get through to officials in state and local governments. And yet, with remarkable frequency, we find that the person whom we first reach on the telephone doesn’t care a whit about helping us — or for that matter treating us with a modicum of gentility and humanity. On occasion, we’ve placed a call, and explained at length about an article we’re writing for a publication,  and then the person on the other end of the phone tells us tersely, “Sorry, we’re not interested in any new subscriptions.” Then there are the folks who think they’re being awfully tricky when they ask us a handful of meandering questions, leave us on hold for several minutes and then come back to say, “I’m sorry, the supervisor (or whoever) is in a meeting right now.” Of course, the truth is that the supervisor doesn’t have time to talk with us — or plain out doesn’t want to. But why make up a meeting? Perhaps worst of all are the intermediaries who — without the slightest notion of what we want — just tell us that there’s no way the source we’re speaking will want to talk to us. On a couple of occasions, when we’ve persevered and explained thoroughly who we’re representing, the answer comes back, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were just a citizen.” It’s that last one that makes us crazy. There shouldn’t be any such thing as “just a citizen.” And if you assume — which is likely — that we have a shot at being treated better than the average taxpayer, then  something is seriously wrong. Whoever is answering the phones in city hall or a state house is representing the mayor or governor. If they’re unhelpful, or rude, then callers can easily jump to the conclusion that this is what the city or state government is really like. So, here’s our counsel to HR departments: Be just as careful in hiring the people who answer the phones as you do the people those people work for.

  • Evidence-based practices: How does your state stack up?

    There’s been an explosion of public sector enthusiasm over evidence-based practices in the last five years. But actually understanding the nitty-gritty elements of how to make it work is far rarer. Over many years, we’ve been advisors to the Results First initiative, a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and The MacArthur Foundation. This past year, we watched the care with which the staff developed a comprehensive guide to “evidence-based policy-making”. The report that resulted from the team effort  was released last week, “How States Engage in Evidence-Based Policymaking.” This is an extremely comprehensive guide to the important steps that are necessary to getting this worthy idea going and it’s also a courageous effort to sort out which states are at the head of the pack, which are in the middle and which are trailing. “The report shows that many states are already employing some evidence-based policymaking actions,” Sara Dube, director of the Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative told us. “It also shows that more can be done – even by the leading states – to ensure budget and policy decisions are informed by evidence and data.” One important caveat. The report looks at the processes and laws in place. It doesn’t explore the actual implementation. But it’s a great start at scoping out where states are, not where they talk about being. For example, you can say you want to fund programs based on “the evidence”, but that has little meaning unless you define what different levels of evidence actually mean. There are some startling results in the report. We were surprised to see that Michigan and Maryland were among the seven “trailing states,” as  those governments have earned lots of praise for other management systems in the past.  Other trailing states are Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire and West Virginia. At the top of the class were Washington, Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut and Oregon. There are lots of good examples of how these and other states have made use of state-based and national/international evaluations of what works and what doesn’t. For example, one of the many programs the report describes is Utah’s development of a “statewide registry of evidence-based prevention programs” to guide contracting decisions for the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health. Another example from Minnesota: In criminal justice, the state and its counties are using a checklist developed by the University of Cincinnati to look at which community interventions adhere to evidence-based practices.  In Oregon, in the current biennium, $57.2 million in grants went to local public safety agencies that have shown “proven strategies to reduce recidivism and save prison costs.” The project looked at four areas of public policy – behavioral health, child welfare, criminal justice, and juvenile justice. Interestingly some states are excellent in one of these areas, but have few systems in place in others. For example, Florida, which is one of the states in the second tier, does very well in juvenile justice, but has fewer evidence-based policymaking tools in place for child welfare. The Results First website also has some useful interactive maps showing how states did on the various criteria that were used in the evaluation.

  • A bright Nebraska idea

    This sounds like a grand idea – actually two grand ideas. The State of Nebraska is embarking on a three-year study of energy use in its 3,700 buildings. That kind of comprehensive benchmarking effort, partially financed by the federal government, has lots of promise in reducing both state costs and energy consumption. But this is the part that really caught our eye: The project is designed to help both state and local government and one of the strategies is to train high school students to do energy-efficiency reviews in their own communities, so there won’t be a shortage of trained manpower as this extensive effort accelerates. They’ll use an assessment tool developed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Business Administration. The state has already embarked on a similar effort at wastewater treatment plants, with college interns gathering data on 82 plants. These projects are exactly the kind of active civic learning that will draw young people into government and increase their levels of understanding about how government operates and what it can accomplish. This was a prime message of the report we wrote for The Council of State Governments: “Civic Education: A Key to Trust in Government”, which was released last month. While learning about government is important, you also need action to make it memorable and interesting. As Dick Simpson, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, told us, “Just a dry set of facts is not sufficient.”

  • Quote of the Day

    “More than 60 percent of the changes we see across all local government involve organizations adopting a standard prevailing practice. About 25 to 30 percent take up a leading practice, which is not widely adopted yet but recognized as effective. Just a small group are trying emerging practices. But if you’re going through the effort of making a change, why not consider the leading practice over the prevailing practice?” — Karen Thoreson, President of the Alliance for Innovation in our Q&A with her in Governing Magazine.

  • Do internal audit departments follow best practices?

    A January audit by the excellent performance audit team in Louisiana’s legislative audit office found that shortages of dollars and management misunderstanding of internal audit functions are impairing the ability of the state’s 35 internal audit divisions. Fifty-seven percent did not report to an audit committee, a recommendation of the Institute of Internal Auditors; 74 percent did not have a current quality assurance review, even though that’s required by professional standards and state law; 31 percent said management requests or mandated audits hindered their ability to prioritize audits based on risk-based criteria. In a survey response, one internal auditor told the legislative audit team: “Many agency heads do not understand the true role of Internal Audit. Internal auditors are often asked to conduct tasks that impair independence or prevent them from performing a true internal audit function.” It was no surprise to us that the biggest challenge cited by internal auditors was their limited budgets. Many are very thinly staffed. In fact, the audit points out that half are one-person outfits.

  • How independent should auditors be?

    Just yesterday, in a Portland City Council meeting. the city’s auditor, Mary Hull Caballero, argued that the city charter interferes with the independence of her office. Her primary gripes: Currently the charter requires that she take advice, as do city departments generally, from city attorneys. The charter also creates a situation in which she’s dependent on the Office of Management & Finance, as it controls important functions that the auditor’s office depends on, like human resources and contracting. Then, too, the city budget office makes recommendations about her budget, which could compromise her ability to criticize that office. So, here’s the question. Can the Portland auditor, and others,  fairly examine the operations and performance of these or other city offices if she is dependent on their services? We can see that  this might be a problem. But there’s another side to the issue; shouldn’t agencies and departments, which hold other agencies and departments accountable,  be held accountable themselves? At least one commissioner, Amanda Fritz, seems opposed to changes in the charter. We didn’t get a clear idea as to why, from the coverage of yesterday’s meeting, but past articles have cited her view that the auditor’s office needs more oversight itself and that investigations of personnel complaints would be a particular problem if it wasn’t under the authority of the Bureau of Human Resources. There will likely be a referendum in May for citizen’s to vote on a change in the city charter to provide more independence for the auditor. For more information, there’s a  write-up of yesterday’s council meeting here.

  • Misleading road signs

    Don’t believe what you see. We get lost a lot. It’s common, in our car, to hear our voices harshly cussing out the GPS (when it starts to assert that it’s “recalculating,” we want to throw it out the window. But at least that’s better than the times when we’re yelling at one another.) With our mutual lack of a sense of direction, we’re particularly dispirited when road signs are unclear – or even wrong. And that happens more often than you’d think. We have to wonder why towns and cities aren’t somewhat more careful on this front. Here’s Exhibit A:  For over a year, we’ve entered the FDR Drive just after 34th street to be greeted by two signs that clearly advise us to get out of the two right hand lanes. They’re “closed,” the orange signs claim. But they’re not. We have never — not once — seen the right two lanes closed in hundreds of times that we’ve taken this route. Changing lanes on this busy three-lane stretch of road is never a snap and so we feel particularly sorry for the folks who don’t know, as we do, that the only way these signs are useful is if you ignore them. So, that’s what we do. Of course, if ever reality matches the signage, we’ll be out of luck, just like all the people who follow them now are.

  • Mysteries of transportation project selection

    We keep a close eye on the output of auditors’  offices in states and local governments. We’ll be reporting about them, as a regular feature on this website dubbed “Audit Watch.” Here’s the first one. How transparent are processes for selecting one transportation project over another? Do they utilize understandable selection criteria and benefit cost analysis? The answer was no in Georgia, where a December 2016 audit criticized the selection process.  Problems popped up in both documentation and stakeholder communication, with a poll of officials at Metropolitan Planning Organizations finding that 44 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that the selection process was transparent. “The Planning Division does not require any documentation or explanation for programming a low scoring project ahead of a high scoring project,” the audit said.

  • Mourning deceased government programs

    In the 25 years we’ve spent watching state and local government, we’ve found ourselves mourning more than a few terrific programs and organizations that have fallen by the wayside. Their demise is sometimes due to cyclical budgetary downturns; sometimes to death blows exerted by powerful political foes. We number among the inhabitants of our virtual government graveyard the Oregon Progress Board, Florida’s Commission on Government Accountability, the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center and, of course, the much mourned U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. But it’s mostly the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center that’s on our minds right now. In the years when we were evaluating government management and performance, we often praised the Center for doing what so many governments didn’t do – think about the future. Today we want to praise it one more time with a posthumous pat on the back, based on a report we recently read about Kentucky’s path away from dependency on tobacco products to a much more diversified economic base. According to an article written by Rebecca Hanchett for the Kentucky 2016 Interim Legislative Record last summer, in 1998, tobacco delivered about 25 percent of the state’s farm cash receipts and was grown by 46,000 farmers. Today it accounts for about 6 percent, involving about 4,500 farmers. This doesn’t mean that agriculture receipts themselves are down. They’re at record levels. But the Commonwealth made some good decisions around the turn of the century to use its tobacco master settlement money to diversify crops. At a Southern Legislative Conference last summer, representatives of several other southern states were chagrined. “They wish they’d done what we we’d done,” said Warren Beeler, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy. Of course, we can’t directly connect the Long-Term Research Center’s excellent 1994 report about the shakiness of tobacco dependency on the decisions that legislative leaders later made. But it certainly did add important elements to the discussion and got leaders talking. We asked Michael Childress what he thought. Childress is currently research associate for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business. He was executive director of the long-term policy research center from 1993 until its demise in 2010. “It’s impossible for me to definitively connect the dots linking this report to the manner in which the tobacco settlement funds were distributed.  I believe that I can say that the report, without question, got decision makers talking about the challenges facing Kentucky’s tobacco industry in a way they did not previously.  It was as if many knew that the emperor had no clothes, but were afraid to say so publicly.  This report, and the accompanying media attention it garnered, provided the political cover that apparently was necessary for state leaders to begin the public dialogue about a post-tobacco rural economy.” We wish the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center still existed and we wish more governments had organizations like this.

  • B&G Report

    We hope the site will be helpful, interesting and even entertaining to you, and that you’ll visit frequently. There will be something new here almost every few days (and our Twitter feed will, of course, be updated several times a day). So, if you’ve gone a week without checking in, we guarantee that you’ll find the visit worthwhile. Future Entrees in the B&G Report space will tend to be tied to the news. (And we think it’s justifiable to claim that this one qualifies inasmuch as it’s pretty big news to us that our website has gone live). The B&G Report feature will give us an opportunity to bring our readers up to date with our insights into the most current events in the world of state and local governments. We may also use this space for commentary from interesting practitioners, academics, elected officials, journalists and so on. New, credible reports about states and localities that come to our attention will also be featured here. Or we may just want to use the space to vent! While we are supporters of the good work that is frequently accomplished by state and local government, we’re real believers in the idea that government should be held accountable. As a former New York City comptroller said “It’s not that government is bad. It’s stupid government that’s bad.” We hope you’ll feel free to go to the “Contact Us” section and respond (especially when we’re mostly voicing our own opinions]. What’s more, if you’ve got something you’d like us to share with our audience – even if it has nothing to do with anything that’s already appeared on this site – please let us know. We’d like the Barrett and Greene, Inc. website to be a virtual conference without any virtual chicken for lunch. (In fact, lunchtime might be a good time to visit us here. Get yourself a nice sandwich, some chips and an appealing beverage, and we’ll be here to educate or entertain you, right inside your computer, tablet or cell phone.) One last note. We’ve covered information technology for years. We wrote a book, Powering Up, about the subject over a decade ago. And one thing we know for sure. Something, or many things, will be mucked up on this site the day it goes live. Sorry about that. Let us know, and we’ll fix it. Welcome, Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene Barrett and Greene, Inc.

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