Management by hunches hurts those who most need help
In a city with a low-wage economy, those most hurt by government mismanagement and inefficiency are the working poor.
Now, HUD provides evidence of yet another government failure that hurts the poor.
Among its many findings, the report shows that HANO is understaffed in most departments, often with undertrained employees and relies too heavily on contractors to perform its daily work. The agency is also operating its programs without accurate data on the programs’ financial condition, does not have a plan to that adequately repairs, renovates or reoccupies units, rendering its lists of vacant units meaningless, since ostensibly all of them could be filled in a city with such an acute lack of housing affordable to those at the lowest income levels.
In general, accurate data at HANO seems to be hard to find. “In absence of good, accessible data,” the report concluded, “HANO has developed a culture that is comfortable with uninformed decisionmaking.”
The NolaStat policy reform offers two simple answers to fix this problem:
1) Benchmark performance metrics for all city agencies to ensure that the public is well-served.
2) Publish city data to support independent research.
Other priorities for the next mayor should be:
1) Modernize and integrate the information systems of disparate agencies to support performance management goals, and improve agency coordination.
2) Build up the professional qualifications of civil service workers so that — as Mitch Landrieu has committed — they have “subject matter expertise.”
To facilitate those broad goals, a high priority for Mitch should be a competitive search for a new Chief Information Officer/Chief Technology Officer. In the same way that we’re insisting on a national search for a new police chief, we should insist on a new search for a CIO/CTO, because the position has such a critical impact on the operations of every city agency.
Furthermore, if he’s willing to accept the responsibility, here is a perfect role for fair housing advocate James Perry in Mitch’s administration. It’s fundamentally critical to the well-being of New Orleans residents than that there be an adequate supply of safe, clean, accessible affordable housing.
