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As we recently reported in the second of a two-part series about Trust In Government for Route Fifty, about 45% of Americans have a less than favorable view of the trustworthiness of local governments, according to data from Polco. That’s somewhat up from 40% in 2017. And while it’s better than the federal government it’s still a very sorry state of affairs. In that series, we recommended several ways that states and localities can help engender greater confidence in their efforts to serve residents; the one that was probably nearest and dearest to our hearts was the use of performance management. Of course, simply measuring everything in sight isn’t going to grab the public’s attention. In fact, it’s repeatedly dismayed us that governments that have robust means of measuring quality are often skeptical about sharing their findings with the public. Some seem to believe that they’ll only be hit over the head with a statistical stick when efforts don't pay off. As Marc Holzer, a well-known academic and author of Rethinking Public Administration, says, “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 by management because they don’t want to put themselves in the line of fire.” That’s a big mistake. 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.” There’s little question that there’s a strong journalistic urge to put bad news on the front page, while better news winds up someplace on page seven.  As The Guardian reported some years back, “people’s interest in news is much more intense when there is a perceived threat to their way of life. They care much less about what happens around them when they enjoy relative peace and/or relative prosperity.” But as true as that may be, we’d like to make the argument that if bad news trumps good news, transparency can help cultivate trust even in times when the news may not be good. This is particularly true at the local level, where people tend to know what’s happening around them. They know when the roads are falling apart. They know when there are homeless people wrapped in newspapers on the streets. They know when their children pretend to be sick rather than attending a dangerous school. Hiding the truth doesn’t help. Rather it’s telling the truth – good or bad – and telling the public what’s being done to make it better. #TrustInGovernment #StateandlocalTransparency #PublicSectorTransparency #StateandLocalManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #RouteFifty #POLCO #RethinkingPublicAdministration #MarcHolzer #MichaelPagano #ReportingStateandLocalPerformance #StateandLocalMedia #StateandLocalCommunications

Back some years ago, when we first started to evaluate management capacity in states, counties, and cities for the now defunct Financial World magazine we were forced by the editors and publisher to rank the entities we were evaluating from best to worst. We hated that for many reasons. As far as we could see the difference between number 29 and number 30 wasn’t even marginally significant and yet these comparisons were often picked up by the local press. That made the publisher happy as he loved to get lots of attention, but it never ceased to bother us. Subsequently, when we began our work on the Government Performance Project, we took great care to make it clear that while we were evaluating and even grading the states, we weren’t ranking them. We carefully avoided ever using that word preferring to refer to our “evaluations”. Perhaps the GPP, which utilized the skills of many highly regarded academics and a team of journalists didn’t stir up the same kind of media frenzy than the far-far-far less-rigorous Financial World work (which was entirely done by the two of us), but the leadership at Pew and Governing were more interested in contributing solid useful information to the world of public sector management than they were in creating a stir. In the years that have passed, it seems to us that there must be some kind of gold mine in the field of publishing 1-50 rankings of the states and similar lists of best and worst cities. And we cringe when we see many of them, for a variety of reasons. Forbes (which seems addicted to these kinds of lists) went so far about a year ago as to publish a 50-state ranking titled “States With The Most Devoted Dog Owners.”  According to the article, the ranking was based on a survey of 10,000 dog owners (200 per state) and compared them across seven metrics, including “the percentage of dog owners who broke up with a significant other who didn’t like their dog.” Apparently, “6.78% of dog owners broke up with a significant other who didn’t like their dog.” Woof. Beyond the dubious nature of this kind of metric, and the value of such a list in the first place, the idea that you can get a solid sampling by asking 200 people from every state, regardless of its size, has zero merit. California dog owners were represented by about .0005% of its population. We don’t want to get distracted by criticizing this kind of foolishness, though. That’s like shooting fish in a barrel. We’re far more concerned about rankings that are taken somewhat more seriously. For example, though we won’t be the first or the last to complain about the value of the U.S. News rankings of universities, they’re worth mentioning here. For starters, these rankings always seem like a dangerous exercise to us, as we see families making decisions about college selections based on these rankings instead of the value of the program to which the high school senior is applying. Beyond that, there have been plenty of criticisms of the methodology used to make these lists. Beyond the specifics, there have been lots of complaints about the ever-shifting methodology which makes for significant changes in the rankings themselves. As Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University wrote in Inside Higher Ed,  “Does this mean those of us who’ve fallen in the rankings are objectively worse than we were a year ago? Does it mean a university that shot up the list is suddenly orders of magnitude better? Of course not. The shifts in rankings are largely due to the changes in methodology.” This raises two questions: Was the last year’s methodology wrong and that’s why there was a change? Or is it in the interests of the publication to see changes from year to year in order to make the horse race more exciting? If all this wasn’t cause for concern about the validity of these rankings then consider the  January New York Times article that pointed out that “U.S. News sells ‘badges’ to colleges so they can promote their rankings – whether they are 1st, 10th or much much lower.” While the college rankings are probably the best known, there are also a plethora of lists of “best places to work.” We can’t begin to enumerate all the potential flaws in these lists, but the degree to which they vary from ranking to ranking isn’t a very good signal that they should be regarded as valid. For example, one list of “the best and worst states for work-life balance,” indicated that New Hampshire was the best of the lot. But then there was another ranking that claimed to demonstrate that New Hampshire was the worst state to be a teacher. Don’t teachers care about work-life balance? We’ll bet they do. Let’s say for the sake of argument – and we don’t believe a word of it – that both lists were accurate, teachers reading the first one could be heading as fast as they can to New Hampshire only to find out that in their profession they’d be better off anyplace else. Finally, let’s think a bit about the “best places to live list.” Best for whom? These are almost always blunt instruments for coming up with a very complicated answer. Some lists use the level of home ownership as a measure of a good place to live. But that would mean that Manhattan is probably not the place for you, where high costs mean that only about 24 percent of the population own their own place. But there are clearly other reasons some people love living in Manhattan. We did for over 35 years and cherished every minute of it. All while paying rent. One more: Let’s say that in your opinion low taxes are a wonderful way to pick your home state. Lots of lists rank the states by that criteria and you’d be led to believe you should head for Florida, which is famous for its exceedingly low tax burden. But d0 you have children in schools? Then it may be important that your teachers are well paid, and on that measure, Florida could hardly do any worse. Take things a step further and assume that you only care about low taxes and have no interest in the children of the state – but you happen to be a member of the LGBTQ community – well we don’t need to say any more about that. #StateandLocalManagement #StateandLocalManagementRanking #FlawedStateRanking #FlawedCityRanking #FlawedBestPlacesToLiveRanking #FlawedUniversityRanking #USNews&WorldReportCollegeRanking #ForbesRanking #GovernmentPerformanceProject #FinancialWorldStateRanking #FinancialWolrdCityRanking #FinancialWorldGovernmentRanking #GoverningGradingtheStates #InsideHigherEducation #SillyStateComparisons #StateRanking #CityRanking #BestPlacestoLiveRanking #CollegeRanking #B&GReport

In the tension-filled political week before the midterm elections, we were particularly grateful for a relatively new podcast called “You Might be Right,” a mostly weekly, sometimes biweekly show that features two former governors from Tennessee talking about a wide variety of issues. The particularly refreshing part of this show for us is that Governor Bill Haslam is a Republican and Governor Phil Bredesen is a Democrat, and they talk to each other about complex issues in the most civil terms without attack or easy soundbite. In the first months of the show, produced at the Howard Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, guests have been invited to explain their positions on opposite sides of such topics as the Affordable Care Act, Charter Schools, the National Debt and the Affordable Housing crisis. The governors ask questions, talk about the issues, and occasionally reflect on their own leadership experiences, leaving listeners with lots to think about and no easy answers. The Affordable Care Act discussion, for example, which aired on October 26, gave the governors an opportunity to question Nancy-Ann DeParle, one of the architects of the Act during the Obama administration and Larry Van Horn, a Vanderbilt professor, who has been a noted critic of it. At its conclusion, one of Phil Bredesen’s comments deftly summed up his reaction to the discussion, making a key point about the nature of the podcast at the same time. “Most problems benefit from picking and choosing a little bit from different ideologies. And I think both of us have had the experience of doing that. So, I looked at both of these not in terms of one is the right answer and one is the wrong answer, but what can we glean from each of them, which can be useful in solving the problem.” The show’s title is based on the late Senator Baker’s belief that solid answers to vexing problems emerge when listening to someone on the opposite side. “In politics, the competition for ideas, the competition for the right to serve is fundamental and it is political. But it must be accompanied by a decent respect for the other fellow’s point of view. Because if you don’t do that, the whole system falls, it collapses, if you don’t admit that the other person may be right from time to time.”' New podcasts are generally posted on Wednesdays, with access to episodes here. We like the fact that transcripts are also available as it’s sometimes tricky to tell which governor is talking if you don’t come from Tennessee and have a solid familiarity with their voices. Listen and see what you think of this B&G Report Recommendation. And if the spirit moves you, suggest other podcasts that might be of interested to those of us who are dedicated to state and local government. #DedicatedtoStateandLocalGovernment #StateandLocalPolicyImplementation #IntergovernmentalRelations #QuotesaboutGovernment #BarrettandGreeneRecommendations #PolicyImplementation #PolicyOversight #PodcastRecommendation #StateofTennessee #HowardBakerJrCenterforPublicPolicy #GovernorPhilBredesen #GovernorBillHaslam #AffordableHousing #AffordableCareAct #YouMightBeRightPodcast

Picture this: You’ve gotten off the interstate highway, and are trying to get to your destination of choice. Your car runs into a big pothole, and you feel the nauseating sensation that accompanies one of your tires slowly flattening. Who should you be annoyed at for the lack of reasonable maintenance? The town? The county? The state? Bet a nickel that you – like we – rarely have any idea who’s responsible for the roads you’re using. Or maybe the roads are just filthy. What governmental entity has let the debris gather? Who knows? But shouldn’t you care about this kind of thing, especially when it comes time to vote for county commissioners, mayors or governors? Roads are a particularly good example of a phenomenon that we think stands in the way of the citizenry’s ability to deal with, or even have trust in, government: On all sorts of levels, people simply don’t know what government does what, with just a handful of exceptions. We don’t believe, for example, anyone is confused enough to think that Minneapolis has the capacity to send troops overseas. Then there are the social services government provides. We’ve had any number of casual conversations with friends, who don’t work in government, and believe that Medicaid is entirely paid for by the federal government. But, of course, it’s shared by states and the feds, and in New York City, by the city, too. (For that matter many people don't even understand the difference between Medicaid and federally supported Medicare.) But if you don’t know who’s paying the bills, how can you possibly think through the issues involved with American health care, which pop up in the press relentlessly. Education is another big one. While the U.S. Department of Education is a hugely important federal agency, it provides fewer than 10% of the dollars that actually go to education. Most of the rest comes from states and localities, with states taking the lion’s share of that. And of course, the state/local split varies a great deal depending on where you live. Then there are jails and prisons. The former are generally under the auspices of counties, and the latter are run by the states. The level of government that tends to suffer most from this confusion are the counties. Not only do are they frequently overlooked by individuals, even the federal government sometimes forget that they even exist. As we wrote in a white paper for the IBM Center for the Business of Government, “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." So here we have a modest proposal. Wouldn’t it be cool if any visible sign of government work were labeled with the origin of its funding? So, the snow truck would have a sign on the side saying, “Your streets are being kept clear through city tax dollars.” Or, “this jail is making life safer for you, courtesy of your county.” We know that’ll never happen. But we like the idea. Do you? #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalTransporation #StateandLocalGovernmentTransparency #StateandLocalGovernmentAccountability #StateandLocalCitizenOutreach #StateandLocalCivicEducation #IntergovernmentalRelations #IntergovernmentalIgnorancy #CountyRoads #StateRoads #CityStreets #FederalHighways #ConfusingIntergovernmentalResposibility #TrustinGovernment #RoadManagement #StateandLocalInfrastructureManagement #IBMCenterfortheBusinessofGovernment #CountyIgnorance #CitizenCivicIgnorance #PerplexingGovernmentREsponsibilties #SharedGovernmentalResponsibility #BandGReport #BandGRecommendation

Over the course of years, we’ve given speeches about a variety of topics -- ranging from human resources to performance management to budgeting. But whatever the nature of the talk, when it’s time for Q&A, eventually someone asks us something like this: “There’s so much good happening in our government. How come the press never seems interested in anything but bad news?” First, we suggest in a transparently self-serving way, that if people want to get out important news about their government, they should write to us or call us. After we wait for the audience members to chuckle a bit (which they sometimes do), we generally offer up one or more of the following six pieces of advice, and we thought we'd share them with readers of this B&G Report. 1) Reach Out Yourself. Sometimes state and local governments will send out a press release to announce a new exciting program or initiative. These days that press release often comes through e-mail. But it takes little reflection to realize that the average person who can get an article published has an in-box full of messages competing for attention. What’s more, an impersonal press release is far less likely to capture a writer’s interest than a more informal personal note. Caution here: It’s easy to tell when a mass mailing is being disguised as a personal note, even when the recipient’s name is at the top. You might be surprised to hear how many allegedly personal notes we get that are addressed to “Dear Barrett,” because our company is “Barrett and Greene,” Inc. and auto-generated letter-makers think Barrett must be the first name. (And “and” must be our middle name, like “the” is the middle name of “Smokey the Bear,) We understand that practically everyone in state and local government is overloaded with work, and that writing a good note takes a little time. But that can be the cost of communicating in an effective way. 2) Don’t oversell. We’re talking here about getting good news out. But when the good news is tempered with whatever cautionary details are pertinent it has a great deal more credibility. For example, if there are no proven results for a new program, but you’re excited about its potential, it’s not a bad idea to make that clear to someone who is interviewing you. Some people are inclined to pepper their interviews with multiple superlatives about how the effort underway in their city, county or state is “the first of its kind,” or “a major innovation,” or a “best practice.” And that may be effective with reporters who are reasonably new on the job. But, to borrow a phrase from the advertising industry, you’re “selling the sizzle, not the steak.” Ultimately, if an interviewer asks you for concrete examples about the potent results of the effort, and you have none, that won’t do anyone any good. 3) Tell stories. This may be the single most important piece of counsel we have to offer. Much of the good work being done by government can be pretty complicated in nature. And if you confine yourself to “prose that’s gritty with numbers,” as an old college friend of ours put it, you can easily lose someone’s attention. Consider, for a moment, the kinds of articles that you enjoy reading. It’s our guess that for most of you, it’s the anecdotes that capture your attention. So, providing the stories up front is just good common sense. 4) Try not to pivot. We know for a fact that some institutions train their employees to stick to a bunch of pre-arranged story points when they’re talking to someone in the press. And if a question comes up that’s not part of one of those themes, the idea is to “pivot,” and stay on message. As far as we can see, this might be totally effective if you’re being interviewed, live, for television or radio. The interviewer may not have the time to dig deeper and get you back to the question that was originally asked. But, speaking for ourselves – and we think for others – changing the subject, however subtly, can be frustrating and annoying, and diminishes the chances that the story you want to tell will be told. Instead, we’d recommend answering the question directly, and then pointing the interviewer to the thoughts that you think are important and necessary for readers to completely understand what’s going on. 5) Don’t lie. As we type those words, we picture some of the readers of this B&G report feeling a sense of distaste. Calling people liars is a nasty business. So, maybe we should use a more tasteful phrasing: “Don’t dissemble.” Still, however gently we phrase this idea, it’s not uncommon for people to want to fudge the facts a bit to make things look better. Talking about “huge numbers” of people who support an idea, when in fact, you only know that there are a couple of dozen is a common example. Then too, there are lies (oh, that word) of omission. Failing to mention that a new program is really just in its pilot stages can get it covered. But if the reporter eventually discovers the truth, you’ll have lost credibility. And given the relatively small number of people who are likely to be covering your story, it’s not wise to be seen as an unreliable source. 6) Follow Up When You Say You Will. If, during the course of a conversation with an interviewer, you don't have a fact or figure handy that's easy to understand. There's no reason not to offer to look it up and get back. But when you make that offer, don't forget, or keep the reporter waiting for a long time (or worse yet, ignore entreaties to provide the remaining numbers). This isn't just counterproductive. It's rude. And rude won't get you quoted. #GovernmentMediaRelations #PublicSectorStoryTelling #StateandLocalStoryTelling #StateandLocalManagement #StateandLocalCommunications #StateandLocalPressRelations #PublicSectorMediaRelations #B&GReportRecommendations

Recently, a relatively high-level manager in a large southern city told us about the progress her city was making in energizing a brand-new performance management system there. She told us that this was the first time her city had ever done something like this. But wait. When we were first covering performance management several decades ago, this same city was known for being a leader in exactly that kind of work. We pointed this out to our source who was interested to hear the news. This kind of thing happens all-too-frequently to us, and to others who have been around the world of state and local government for a while. We’re not suggesting that new employees in a city or a state need to take a course in the history of management where they’re working. But it’s really a pity when they lose the opportunity to build on old efforts – figuring out why they succeeded or failed – and then work from there, instead of starting from scratch. We were talking about this with Marc Holzer the well-known public administration scholar who got is PhD from the University of Michigan in 1971. His take: “These people aren’t building new things. They’re re-inventing things all the time. And they make mistakes they made before that could have been prevented.” One of our favorite quotes about this topic comes not from the world of the public sector but from Vatican City, where Pope Francis has said, "The lack of historical memory is a serious shortcoming in our society. A mentality that can only say, 'Then was then, now is now', is ultimately immature. Knowing and judging past events is the only way to build a meaningful future. Memory is necessary for growth." The risks of losing track of the past can be serious. For example, consider the way many states and cities are currently dealing with their surpluses (many of which were created by extra dollars from the federal government in recent years). Contrary to the Government Finance Officers’ Association admonitions to spend one-time revenues on one-time expenditures, we see state after state cutting their taxes and increasing their expenditures, which is likely going to leave them up against a fiscal wall. We’ve written in the past about the over-use of the word innovations in part because many new programs are described that way simply because the current administration doesn’t have any notion that they’ve been tried or suggested in the past. “But,” as we wrote in early 2022, “when governments overemphasize the notion that their future lies in innovating, they can miss out on another equally important concept: that there are lots of good ideas for successful government that aren’t brand new – but simply need to be implemented.” #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement #PerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceManagement #PerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentInnovation #PublicSectorHistory #ForgottenCityHistory #HistoricalKnowledge #StateandLocalInnovation #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #GFOA #MarcHolzer #HistoricalMemory #MissingHistory #StateandLocalGovernmentBudgeting #State and Local Surplus

Typically, when we hear about a city or state choosing not to gather more potentially useful data because it’s too time consuming, we push back. But there are exceptions. A notable one is an element of New York City legislation called the “How Many Stops Act”, which would require New York police officers to report on every single police street stop and investigative encounter, including demographic information about the person stopped and the reason for the encounter. We agree that officers should be held accountable and that strong actions are needed to prevent racial profiling. But in this case, we’d argue the legislation goes a few steps too far. It would require, for example, that following a crime, police officers would have to fill out a form to record every time they interact with a witness or a possible witness. Let’s say for example, a liquor store was robbed, and the perpetrator ran out into a busy city street afterwards. When police arrive at the crime scene and ask dozens of people on the street whether they saw anyone running out of the store, they’d have to do the appropriate time-consuming paperwork. Without disputing the goals of gathering this information, the question is this: Regardless of the validity of a cause, aren’t there instances in which gathering mountains of data is potentially counter-productive? On January 19th, New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams vetoed the Bill, tweeting out the following: “You know my story. I've been the victim of police abuse. And I've been a police officer. But while our administration supports efforts to make law enforcement more transparent, more just, and more accountable, this bill would take officers away from policing our streets and engaging with the community. Today, I vetoed the ‘How Many Stops Act’ because it will make our city less safe.” On late afternoon Tuesday, January 30, the City Council overrode the Mayor’s veto, and the bill will now become law. Jim Quinn, who was executive district attorney in the Queens District Attorney’s office and now writes for the New York Post did a little back-of-the-envelope math in that newspaper:  “There are about 30,000 uniformed police officers, detectives and sergeants. If just half of them fill out only one form a day, and it takes one minute to complete, that is 15,000 minutes — or 250 hours of police time wasted each day.” And that’s just one form a day per person! The word “wasted,” is a little too strong for our tastes, as we know there are instances in which this information would be valuable. From our perspective though, this presents the kind of question that’s easier to ask than to answer: “When it comes to requiring that more data be gathered, will the benefits outweigh the costs?” One element involved in considering this question (though not one that necessarily applies to the police data in New York City) is whether the managers or elected officials in an organization are really going to use the data that’s been painstakingly gathered. These are busy people and many of their computers are jammed with gigabytes of spreadsheets and hundreds of data points. When data can be gathered from information that’s automatically being generated (like time sheets or budgets) this is less of a concern than when the data requires public sector staff time to assemble. We’d argue that this should be central in the minds of people who are determining what data-gathering requirements we impose on city and state employees. #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalGovernmentDataManagement #CityData #CityDataManagement #CityDataCollection #PoliceData #NewYorkCityPoliceData #NYPD #NYPDDataCollection #HowManyStopsAct #NewYorkCityPolice #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceMeasurement #PoliceDataCollection #DataCollectionBurden #NewYorkCityPoliceData #MayorEricAdams #NewYorkCityCouncil #DataBurden #UnintendedConsequences #RacialProfiling #B&GReport #CostBenefitAnalysis #DataCostBenefitAnalysis

Back in 2020, then President Donald Trump proclaimed that “The murder rate in Baltimore and Detroit is higher than El Salvador, Guatemala or even Afghanistan.” That statement was misleading and part of it was outright false, but even beyond that, he left out the fact that reported homicides in Detroit were near 50-year lows. Currently, Detroit has the third highest homicide rate in the country, according to World Population Review, which is still an unfortunate state of affairs. But look at the trends and a new picture emerges. According to the city’s data, it “finished 2023 with 252 homicides, the fewest recording since 1966.” Most experts would agree – and Detroit is a perfect illustration – that any single point of data can be misleading if it’s not put into a broader framework, often with the use of trend lines. As Ron Holifield, CEO of Strategic Government Resources, told us, “When you’re just looking at a single piece of data without context it’s like looking through a peephole without seeing the entire room. Under the worst of circumstances that leads to a false and misleading perception.” It’s certainly easy for reporters to take a single point of data from a recent year and turn it into a headline (either positive or negative). But historical perspective changes a single piece of information into something that’s genuinely informative. Says Liz Steward, the vice president of marketing and research at Envisio, a strategy and performance management software company.  “Only sharing point in time data can be worse than providing no data at all because showing an individual number can minimize a very big problem or exaggerate one.” Sometimes, it’s in the interest of a reporter or an advocacy group to avoid looking further than a single digit and use it as representative of a full story. “If you see a number that supports your argument it might be easier to just take it, without digging deeper,” according to Sam Gallaher, head of data science at Third Line an audit and financial management software company. “It’s definitely a challenge in doing research and being open to numbers that challenge your hypothesis. It takes some real effort to get past that.” On the flip side, digging a little deeper into statistical history can turn a bad news story into a good one. Entities that understand this and make a point of it can help the press to get the story right. We developed a deep understanding of this in the years that preceded our work on the Government Performance Project. As we’ve recalled in this space, “In the early 1990s Alabama’s leaders took a very poor grade in our evaluations of state government management capacity for the long-defunct Financial World magazine and compared them to our prior --- and even worse—evaluation. The state got some very positive reports in the local press by pointing to the improvement, with promises of more to come.” It's worth noting, however, that simply showing information one or two years back can have the perverse effect of misleading people when the most recent historical data was misleading. For example, comparing data in the last year or so to that which was accurate during the depths of the pandemic can lead to misunderstandings. As a result, many data-wise organizations are comparing current data to that which was generated pre-pandemic. For example, when the Pew Charitable Trusts examined employment rates last summer, it compared first quarter 2023 numbers with those from early 2020. As Mike Maciag, a policy researcher and former data analyst told us, “I’m sure you guys have come across dashboards, where they show information compared to the prior year, which is better than nothing. But snapshots are snapshots, and you’re comparing things to a point in time and that can be misleading when the prior year was abnormal.” While space limitations may prevent many sources of data from featuring a table that shows ten years of prior data, there is an alternative that can help: Compare current year data to a five-or-ten-year average. While there’s no control over how the press or social media outlets use data, state and local governments can help to keep the public better informed by making it easier for others to get a reasonable understanding of its meaning. “Reporters might, if they have time, go back and look at trend lines,” says Maciag. But a lot of times that’s difficult to find.” Cities, counties and states that produce well-wrought publicly available dashboards can help overcome that challenge. Take Corona, a city of about 166,000 in Riverside County, California. Its dashboard shows point-in-time data for a number of key performance indicators, but very clearly directs users to historical data. For example, average response time to a fire there in the most recent quarter was four minutes and 53 seconds. Was that good? Bad? Indifferent? Taken on its own, this number lacks meaning. But at the click of a button you can see that eight quarters ago, it was 5 minutes and ten seconds, and the trend line shows that though there have been ups and downs, the fire department has been bringing that number down steadily. In the final analysis, Nate Silver author of “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t" had it just right, when he wrote “Data is Useless Without Context.” #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #CityData #DetroitHomicideRate #StrategicGovernmentResources #RonHolifield #Envisio #CityCrimeData #CityTrendData #DataTrends #DataContext #LyingWithStatistics #CityDataWithoutContext #PublicSectorDashboards #MisleadingData #MisleadingCityData #LizSteward #Envisio #ThirdLine #PewCharitableTrusts #MikeMaciag #ElizabethSteward #FinancialWorldMagazine #GovernmentPerformanceProject #StateGovernmentEvaluations #DataSnapshotsvsTrendLines #CityofCoronaCA #RiversideCounty #DashboardBestPractice #RonSilver #TheSignalandtheNoise #CityGovernmentPressCoverage #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement

Aristotle had it right when he wrote, “The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” We’ve come across this idea repeatedly over the years in covering state and local governments. Those that are doing the best jobs – whether in HR, budgeting, procurement, infrastructure or any other field of public sector endeavor -- tend to be the ones who are most eager to do better. That’s because, in large part, they know how much can be accomplished in the future. Places that fall into the category we’ve long labeled as laggards, frequently believe that they’ve already accomplished what they need to, and don’t understand that there’s more that can be done. We first became aware of this phenomenon in the early 1990s when we were working on the predecessor of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Government Performance Project, for a now defunct and pretty much forgotten magazine called Financial World. We were evaluating and grading a few dozen cities’ management capacity in a variety of areas including one that we then called “Managing for Results,” (which we now think of, more broadly, as performance management). We did something like 150 interviews to do our evaluations in this category to supplement a survey instrument, we had designed for them to fill out. (Some of the relationships we formed then are still active, though most of our sources back then have since retired or left this earthly plane.) At some point in these conversations, we would ask the people with whom we were speaking to self-evaluate their entity. One of the first cities, in which we talked to management leaders, was Seattle. When we asked them to self-evaluate, they told us how much work still had to be done there. We assumed, based on their self-flagellation, that they’d probably come out with a grade of C. Then we talked to more cities, and as time went on it became increasingly clear to us that Seattle was doing a better job than most. What’s more, we began to see that many of the places that gave themselves glowing self-evaluations were doing everything they thought should be done – but that turned out to be very little at all. We won’t name names. This phenomenon – which we dubbed “The Seattle Syndrome” – has repeated itself over the following decades and up until this day. We ran into one example several years ago when we were chatting with people in Washington State’s King County – the twelfth largest county in the country – for a column in Route Fifty about the utility of data in efforts to improve equity, diversity and inclusion in states and localities. We’ve often covered these issues and knew that King County was a national leader in these efforts. In fact. the place actually decided in 2005 to change the meaning of the word “King” in its name from a remembrance of a slaveholder (Rufus King) to one that stands for Martin Luther King, Jr. Though we were talking to people in King County to get ideas that other communities could emulate – and we accomplished that -- we were also told that program managers there saw their efforts as a work in progress, saw problems, and had great plans to improve the county’s efforts to measure and evaluate performance across the enterprise. The fact that leaders in King County recognized ample room for improvement – even though they were already doing a great job – was a mindset we deeply admire. #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #ManagingforResults #GovernmentPerformanceProject #PewCharitableTrusts #FinancialWorldEvaluationofGovernmentManagement #GradingCityManagement #CityofSeattle #KingCounty #SelfEvaluationFoibles

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 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

A little over two years ago, as we were researching an IBM Center for the Business of Government report about lessons learned from the pandemic, we were confronted with an unfortunate lack of data about the Black population of the United States. As we wrote in the report, co-authored by Don Kettl, “Many states were slow in measuring the disease’s spread among Black Americans, for example, and by mid-summer 2021 some states still did not keep track of the racial background of those who died from the virus.” For obvious reasons – most notably the fact that the Black population was disproportionately hit by COVID – this absence of disaggregated data was particularly troubling to us, as it has been in a number of other areas of inquiry. As a result, when we first heard about the existence of a new project called the Black Wealth Data Center, back in September of 2022, we were intrigued, and wrote a B&G Report about it then. It seemed appropriate for this year's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to revisit and update that column. The Center, which was funded and launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative and incubated by Prosperity Now, makes an important contribution to a world in which data is central to solving problems. Specifically, according to its website, the Center was created to “help address the problem of insufficient and inaccessible data on the topic of Black Wealth.” As the then executive director of the Center, Natalie Evans Harris, said at the demo of the Center’s data-rich website, “You need data that you can rely on, but unfortunately it is often data that is incomplete. . . We want to make sure that . . . government, journalists, non-profits and philanthropies have the data you need in a way that you can rely on it.” The website and data base, which you can find here, explores measures and/or indicators of: Net worth at a national level Business ownership at a national and state level Education at a national level Employment at a national level Homeownership at a national level Population data at a local level Expected annual loss due to natural hazards FDIC Active Institutions per 100,000 people The Center is exclusively a source of information – not a think tank intended to help solve the problems it uncovers. But the Center is actively working to provide actionable data that can help others to take the steps necessary to deal with a whole host of problems, like the fact that Black people have the highest unemployment rate of any race/gender group and that nationwide, the median interest rate paid by the Black population for home mortgages is 4.9 percent, compared with 4.6 percent for White individuals. As things stand, the database is very valuable, but it continues to grow as time goes on. We’d suggest that readers of this B&G Report take a look at the website and the database and provide your feedback about the site by clicking here. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #StateandLocalGovernmentData #DataDisaggregation #PandemicLessons #DonKettl #MissingData #InaccessibleRacialData #IBMCenterfortheBusinessofGovernment #MissingRacialData #BlackWealthDataCenter #BloombergPhilanthropiesGreenwoodInitiative #InsufficientandInaccessibleData #NatalieEvansHarris #PerformanceMeasurement #ActionableData #BlackMaleUnemploymentRate #BlackAmericanInternetAccess #B&GReport