Soccer Dad: Believe the road is fixed

February 19, 2007

Believe the road is fixed

The pride of Governor O'Malley's tenure as mayor of Baltimore was his CitiStat system that was supposed to introduce elements of responsibility into city government. Based on New York's CompStat system for tracking crimes (that the article we will cited does not, but should have, attribute to Mayor Giuliani), the CitiStat system was supposed to analyze the responsiveness of city agencies quantitatively.

Now as the Sun reports, the Governor wishes to institute a similar program, StateState to the state of Maryland.

Matthew D. Gallagher, 35, who oversaw CitiStat and will oversee StateStat as O'Malley's deputy chief of staff, says that moving the city-oriented program to a larger stage makes sense.
. . .

CitiStat was adapted from the crime-mapping Compstat program pioneered in New York City. O'Malley applied the concept to urban issues such as vacant housing, drug treatment and trash collection.

In a former curator's loft in Baltimore's City Hall, his staff constructed a futuristic conference room complete with huge projection screens that danced with freshly updated charts and maps. Officials would explain and interpret data, and were sometimes grilled if the answers did not match up.

The results were tangible: During a three-month trial period, overtime in the Public Works Department dropped by 25 percent and unscheduled leave fell by more than 33 percent.

While critics wondered whether the meetings were just a showy and time-consuming way of managing, the accolades started rolling in. Officials from King County, Wash., to Nicaragua have requested demonstrations, and dozens of municipalities implemented the program. In 2004, CitiStat won an award for innovative government from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Wednesday last week a water pipe burst on a nearby street. Repeated calls have gone in to the relevant city agencies. Last night, guess what? The water's still flowing. I hope some managers in the Department of Public Works are going to grilled over this.

The water of Olympia

With a streetlight

I don't know what metrics were used to show that CitiStat made city government more responsive; but clearly in this case it didn't. (A neighbor told my wife that the city has indeed come out several times and claimed that the problem was fixed. If I remember correctly in order to fix a broken pipe the street needs to be dug up and, as you can see, there's not a lot of mud here, so that hasn't happened. And in sub 30 temperatures, you don't have running water in the street, unless it's coming from some place else. Say, underground.)

It's true, there's a new mayor now and maybe Mayor Dixon didn't run the program effectively when she inherited it. Of course if CitiStat wasn't easily exportable, it makes you wonder how effective it is.

If Mayor Dixon hasn't carried on with CitiStat, it wouldn't be the only O'Malley program she's doing away with. According to the Sun, Mayor Dixon is considering doing away with the Believe campaign.

Criticized by some as a public relations gimmick, the "Believe" bumper stickers, T-shirts, buttons and trash cans became, at the very least, a ubiquitous symbol of O'Malley's administration. Though hard to measure, some say "Believe" accomplished its goal, challenging residents to focus on Baltimore's potential while acknowledging its crime- and drug-ravaged neighborhoods.
"It was the first stage of recovery. I think it was instrumental in causing the community to look at itself in a very stark and realistic way," said Michael Cryor, a communications consultant who revamped O'Malley's public relations office and who was a chairman of the "Believe" effort. "To do that in public was, frankly, pretty novel."

I don't know how CitiStat evaluated "Believe", but unless I'm really wrong (I'm going out on a limb here) I don't believe that a single suspect was arrested by one of those "Believe" bumper stickers. If they didn't accomplish anything it's safe to say that they were just part of a PR campaign.

I haven't observed that city services got significantly better during O'Malley's tenure, so I'm likely to write off CitiStat as more PR than results oriented. Sort of like another one of the Governor's initiatives, the Believe campaign.

UPDATE: I should note that I'm not calling for his impeachement like some blogging hotheads. (Some hothead.) I'm just questioning again the record on which Governor O'Malley got himself elected. It seems awfully thin.

UPDATE II: I should be clear: the job is now Mayor Dixon's to get done. So far she hasn't impressed. Of course it may be that the tools she inherited didn't quite match their press.

UPDATE III: At about 6 PM last night, about 3 hours after my wife called Councilwoman Rikki Spector's office with a complaint, the city trucks were out.

(I took the picture with available light and didn't hold the camera steady.)
Whether it was due to an intercession by our councilwoman or whether the city just scheduled to fix the leak a week after it happened remains uncertain. It hardly is confirmation of responsive government.