So It Begins…

The Citistat Era hath begun…

Mayor Brown unveiled the program on a Friday, which is tradtionally the day on which bad news is released. The news cycle slows to a crawl during the weekend and bad news goes underreported. Just an observation, do with it what you will.

Anyhow, I’m excited about Citistat as a measurement and efficency tool. Can Buffalo repeat the much heralded success of Baltimore in using the system to “reinvent government”? It depends.

The software measures data on an objective basis yet the assumptions used to determine “quality service” are in and of themsleves, subjective and based on assumptions. This is what the unions will be screaming from the mountaintops when it is reported that their departments are inefficient or targeted for improvement.

Was Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley burdened with a group of municipal unions as entrenched and anti-progress as those found in Buffalo? I highly doubt it. Which means that the ultimate success of Citistat will be the ability of the Mayor to “out-politic” the union bosses and sell the story to the people. When the lights are turned on, the rats scurry for cover…it should be interesting to watch the union leaders take their excuses to the disinterested public.

All of this plays to the Mayor’s strength; consensus building and compromise. These are the qualtiies that make an excellent legislator and, by all accounts, Byron Brown was a helluva legislator. It also helps that bulldog Deputy Mayor Steve Casey will evidently be the enforcer of the project.

On the first day, Citistat already provided some returns:

In the midst of the rollout, officials found that the use of compensatory and other time off in the Citizens Services Division was higher in recent months than it should have been. As a result, there were delays handling some complaint calls from citizens.

Division Director Oswaldo Mestre Jr. said an employee has been on prolonged medical leave, a fact that has driven up time-off figures and the number of lost complaint calls. He vowed to resolve the problem, and the CitiStat review team, made of Brown and five Cabinet members, brainstormed on ways to improve the handling of complaints. One option: deploying clerks from other departments to help staff the hotline during periods when call volumes increase, including weeks when garbage user fee bills are mailed.

This is how CitiStat should work, officials emphasized. Bring top officials together frequently, arming them with timely data that allows them to track everything from service-delivery to work force trends. Encourage them to challenge program managers. And perhaps most important, remind the managers that they’ll be held accountable.

The times they are a changin’…