What gets measured gets done
New Orleans is remarkably similar to Baltimore …
When Martin O’Malley was sworn in as mayor of Baltimore in 1999, he inherited a $153 million deficit and 16,000 city employees who, he said, were “wallowing in a culture of failure.” O’Malley identified the source of citizen frustration with Baltimore’s high crime rate, failing schools and broken streets as “a fundamental lack of accountability and sense of mission when it came to what government was supposed to be doing day in and day out.”
That was 10 years ago. Since then, Baltimore has reduced waste by more than $350 million, reinvesting those savings in programs that have reduced violent crime, improved access to affordable housing, returned blighted property to commerce, accelerated street repairs, built modern schools and expanded drug treatment programs.
Can New Orleans do what Baltimore did? What are the stakes?
Read the rest of the NolaStat opinion printed in Saturday’s Times-Picayune.
Hats off to the editorial staff at The Times-Picayune — and especially to Annette Sisco — for seeing the merit in the idea of a NolaStat reform.
