NolaStat is like “a big red light that flashes”
Lee Zurik has been doing some interesting reporting lately on financial abuse at public agencies.
In his ongoing report on the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad, Zurik reported that General Manager Jim Bridger spent $108,000 over three years on meals and liquor — all while earning an eye-popping $350,000 a year, making Bridger one of the highest paid public officials in Louisiana.
In a separate investigation, Zurik discovered that a Sewerage & Water Board power plant engineer earned $93,150.96 in overtime on top of a base salary of $59,101.74, and $19,005.06 in standby pay — and he wasn’t the only one soaking the public.
Interviewed by Eric Asher on WIST 690 AM last week, Zurik posed the $64,000 question that distills the public policy implications of these investigations:
“How do you not have a big red light that flashes when someone makes over $90,000 a year in overtime” (@ 9:24, MP3).
The answer to Lee’s question is that we have still have to invent a big red flashing light for public institutions in New Orleans.
Fortunately, we have a blueprint. All that remains is to make sure that someone builds the thing, turns on the switch, and makes it available for public view.
What’s the blueprint?
The NolaStat reform recommendations call for the creation of a performance management policy that reports essential metrics to the public about how public agencies are operating — and a primary feature of that reporting should be itemized expenditures.
Furthermore, the NolaStat reform recommendations call for improving public access to data — such as accounting data — so that egregious expenditures and overtime pay are open to public scrutiny.
It’s highly instructive to point out that when Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley instituted the CitiStat policy, the first target that he aimed for was balancing the city’s budget by reducing unnecessary overtime and sick leave. Most of the $350 million in savings accrued over seven years was found by reducing payroll abuse. At the same time, O’Malley focused on achieving targeted results on things that mattered to citizens — such as improving public safety, affordable housing, graduation rates, and drug treatment.
The Landrieu administration has already taken solid steps to implement a true performance management policy by hosting a series of community discussions about budget priorities so that a robust Budgeting for Outcomes process can be instituted. This is approaching the idea of a “big red light,” but the NolaStat process calls for regular performance management meetings with agency managers to ensure that priorities are on track.
There’s a nice example found in Washington, D.C., where mayor Adrian Fenty, along with then Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra (who is now President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer), built a “big red light” system based upon traditional stock market investment software, assigning portfolio managers to monitor business intelligence dashboards to troubleshoot or stop projects if they experienced cost overruns or too many missed deadlines.
Landrieu officials have also suggested that the public will have improved access to city data. This is arguably even more critical than performance management, because the public can craft its own “big red light” to monitor city agencies if the data is available.
Whether the administration follows through with a policy that provides meaningful performance metrics and data remains to be seen. New Orleans citizens should remain vigilant.
In private conversations, Landrieu administration officials have shown exceptionally good will in the first 100 days.
Nevertheless, we should never again let down our guard, or be satisfied with the status quo. One way to ensure that we don’t get fooled again is by building that “big red light” system, and insisting on a full implementation of NolaStat recommendations, so that we can be sure public officials are always acting with common sense and in a true spirit of public service.
