A more-efficient approach to governing our cities

BALTIMORE — Is there a way to shatter the secrecy and inefficiencies that so easily plague American government, from city hall to the White House?

Martin O'Malley, youthful mayor of this troubled old city, thinks so. It's his "CitiStat" program, an intensely public way to track each city department's performance — from health to housing, police to parks.

The story starts four years ago when the freshly elected O'Malley rode through troubled Baltimore neighborhoods with Jack Maple, who had been architect of New York City's groundbreaking CompStat program. CompStat tracks hot spots of such scourges as burglaries, assaults and murders, deploying officers to nip crime in the bud. Maple sold O'Malley on the idea that the same computer and map-based fact-gathering — including "hot seat" grilling sessions for police commanders — could be expanded to all local government operations.

O'Malley, about to assume command of Baltimore's increasingly sluggish bureaucracy, decided to take the plunge. Starting with the Bureau of Solid Waste, he gradually expanded his new "CitiStat" reporting system to 16 departments, ranging from finance to homeless issues.

Every two weeks, each department director, flanked by his or her deputies, stands at a podium in a specially designated City Hall briefing room. The interrogators include O'Malley, Deputy Mayor Michael Enright, CitiStat director Matthew Gallagher and other top aides. The questions range far and wide, typically touching on performance indicators, budgets, unexcused absenteeism and responses to citizen complaints.

And the probing — judging by a session on public works I witnessed two weeks ago — is excruciatingly specific and penetrating. The CitiStat team had discovered, for example, that one agency, which has Baltimore's last municipal blacksmith on staff, was charging another city department $200 each for custom-made hammer/pliers to open meter covers. Didn't the price recall the Pentagon's $600 toilets? How about outsourcing?

CitiStat has produced $100 million in cost savings and revenue enhancements since 2000, O'Malley's office contends. The city weathered the recession without being crippled fiscally. One big reason: sharp overtime and absenteeism reductions triggered by CitiStat scrutiny.

Plus, performance is up. The backlog of cleanup projects is down. Ninety percent of potholes get fixed within 48 hours. The city has planted more trees. Drug-treatment services are up. Lead-paint poisoning — a chronic and tragic problem for children in a poor city with old housing — is being attacked with 478 court complaints filed, compared with just one case in the '90s. Citywide, employment is up 10,000. Violent crime is down 29 percent.

Result: Baltimore is better positioned to attract and hold businesses and middle-class residents.

A constant stream of visiting city observers comes to watch CitiStat operations. In whole or part, the system is being copied in Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Miami and Providence.

"The revolutionary feature of this open and transparent system of government," O'Malley argues, "is that it moves us from spoils-based patronage politics to results-based performance politics. A computerized map doesn't know if a neighborhood is black or white, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican. We send the resources where the problems are — or in economic development, where the opportunities are."

But success comes only, he notes, with constant and intense executive pressure, plus relentless follow-up with departments.

What O'Malley's innovation represents, notes Charles Euchner of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is an emphasis on delivering basic services efficiently — a more modest goal, but maybe more effective than mayors of the '60s trying to redistribute wealth, or more recent mayors' preoccupation with big job-generating projects.

Euchner also notes that Baltimore's system of real-time, comprehensive data, transparent to everyone from the mayor to front-line workers, wasn't available until computer and mapping technologies were perfected in recent years. CitiStat's new data-driven climate drove some old-line Baltimore department heads out of government. Yet, for the most part, it's increasing city workers' pride in their jobs. And O'Malley boasts it's attracting graduates of top government-management schools who suddenly see exciting opportunities in municipal government.

CitiStat is most likely to be introduced by newly elected mayors who won't be embarrassed by revelations of some departments' dismal past performance. And yet, the Baltimore experience, notes Lenneal Henderson of the University of Baltimore, shows immense potential.

CitiStat's maps, graphs and analyses, easily accessed at www.ci.baltimore.md.us/news/citistat/, open up the secrets of city operations to City Council members, concerned state and federal officials, indeed all citizens. CitiStat represents nothing less, Henderson argues, than "a critical management and civic communication tool" for our times.

Neal Peirce's column appears alternate Mondays on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com