The public has been invited to City Council chambers tonight to comment on what the city’s budget priorities should be:

As you know, during the month of November the Council will undergo the harrowing process of adopting the 2010 budget, AND we are facing a nearly $68 million deficit based on the 2009 budget.

I am writing to inform you all of a town-hall meeting that Cm. Midura and I are convening next Tuesday, October 27 from 7-9 p.m. in Council Chambers. We wish to explain the 2010 budget situation and to organize your input to assure that the 2010 budget reflects your will. Specifically, I hope to receive your collective city-service priorities to ensure that a just and equitable budget is accomplished.

From my own analysis of the “Budgeting for Outcomes” process over the last two years, I intend to make the comment that the process of yearly performance reviews as part of an annual budget cycle are insufficient for managing government performance. We have to balance the budget this year, but severe budget imbalances are predicted for the foreseeable future. We have to ensure that budget adjustments don’t adversely impact essential city services, or community priorities.

No family could ever live within a budget or fulfill its goals if it only reviewed its finances and priorities once a year. Government is no different.

How do we live within our means without cutting essential city programs and services?

Achieving annual performance goals while observing fiscal discipline requires regular review as part of a weekly or bi-weekly process. This is the lesson from a dozen other cities that have implemented “stat” processes.

Baltimore’s CitiStat process reduced waste by $350 million over seven years. CitiStat didn’t just reduce wasteful expenditures. It allowed mayors Martin O’Malley and Sheila Dixon to reinvest resources in improving access to affordable housing, reducing violent crime, moving blighted houses back into commerce, reducing lead poisioning in children with abatement activities, faster street repairs, building modern schools, improving equity in the city’s economic progress, greening the city, and increasing drug treatment programs. And in order to keep the public informed of agency performance, all reports compiled for CitiStat meetings are posted on the city’s Web site for the public to view.

Washington, D.C.’s CapStat process went even further, posting agency data on the city’s Web site. Public access to city data became the basis for Apps for Democracy, allowing the community to tap city data to build new ways to inform themselves about government operations, including an iPhone application that alerts neighborhood residents of all building permit applications to help eliminate surprise land use changes.

I have been conducting policy research over the last several months to advance a NolaStat policy reform for New Orleans. NolaStat is envisioned as a process to manage the performance of city agencies, and to improve public access to city data. It is a policy that is completely consistent with community participation in the budget process, and that fulfills the vision of the Master Plan to improve community input in land use decisions. In short, a NolaStat reform offers New Orleanians the opportunity to create a better and more participatory government. It isn’t just about changing the people we elect to office, but instead, it’s about changing the operating system of New Orleans.

My hope is that all candidates for municipal office in 2010 will adapt their platforms to include the creation of a NolaStat policy, using the best practices in other cities to model a solution for New Orleans that improves the performance of city agencies, and that improves public access to city information.

Regards,
Brian D

Tags: City Budget, City Council, Civic Participation

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Why NolaStat?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.