Northwood News ♦ February 2008

What is CountyStat and How Will It Help Residents?

By Jim Zepp

Although it sounds like a line from the television show “ER,” CountyStat is a new effort by County Executive Isiah Leggett to make local government agencies more responsive to citizen complaints and efficient in their operations.  CountyStat is based on Governor O’Malley’s CitiStat, a process that he initiated as Baltimore’s mayor for improving that city’s public services and which was an expansion of the CompStat police management approach largely credited with reducing New York City’s crime problems in the 1990s.

Variations of the Stat systems have been widely adopted by State and local governments across the country as a solution to citizens’ discontent with public services and as a mechanism for greater accountability of agencies and managers.  Although it started with police departments, it has been applied to public works, transportation, employment services, and schools.

This style of public management involves regular meetings of the chief executive’s managers and individual agency directors.  Each meeting usually focuses on one agency or major program.  Using a combination of statistical analyses, data maps, and citizen input from surveys and public forums, an agency’s recent performance is examined against various service goals — such as repairing all reported potholes within 48 hours — or operational factors, such as reducing use of overtime by agency staffs.

Agency managers are expected to identify solutions to failures to meet service goals or trends of increasing complaints or negative developments.  This creates an atmosphere which emphasizes the personal accountability by managers for their agency’s performance.  The intent is continuous improvement in government services and citizens’ satisfaction.

The County Executive’s Office has hired a staff, which will start holding CountyStat meetings this month.  The process, information assets, and scope of reviews are expected to evolve and expand as experience is gained from early efforts.  As part of this, the County will shortly implement a 311 call system for citizens to make non-emergency service requests.  Along with a new CRM (Customer Relations Management) system to track complaints, this will provide a means for generating data on how well agencies are responding to citizens.  The County government website will soon have more information about CountyStat and these two initiatives.

Some concerns raised about other Stat programs are that:  (a) there is a tendency to focus on those performance measures for which data is available, rather than what would be of more interest to citizens but harder to obtain information on, and (b) it is a reactive rather than proactive approach to government in that managers’ attention is focused on responding to changes in service statistics.  An example of the latter is that a service goal might be repairing reported potholes within 48 hours as opposed to addressing conditions that contribute to the creation of potholes, such as uncoordinated road work by utility companies and government agencies which results in poorly patched roadways.

Despite these challenges, the County Executive should be congratulated for his efforts to make local government more responsive and accountable to its citizens.  This seems to be a sincere attempt at fulfilling his commitment to improving the quality and effectiveness of county government’s actions.  In the complex environment that elected officials and public managers face, the results of agency actions on citizens’ lives can often get lost.   ■