Does Boston City Hall do a good job of delivering services to its citizens? Are our streets as clean as they could be? Roadways plowed? Potholes filled? Parks kept green and safe?
Local governments around the nation are discovering that there are better ways to deliver basic services. Boston is moving in that direction, but still has a ways to go.
Certainly Mayor Thomas Menino has made the delivery of basic city services the hallmark of his administration. The effort is sincere. And over the last two years most observers would agree that Boston is cleaner, greener and better maintained than in the past.
But good is not great, and Boston can, and should, do better.
The City has organized the delivery of services along functional lines. One department is responsible for the maintenance of roads, for example, while another is responsible for cutting grass in city parks.
With rare exceptions, city managers direct city employees in the performance of these tasks. And, as politicians, including me, have demanded that more attention be paid to the delivery of these basic services, the number of city employees delivering these services has mushroomed.
My suspicion is that Boston has plateaued in the delivery of city services. To do better will require that we make dramatic changes in how we manage and how we deliver city services.
To begin, government must start to think of itself more as a business. Residents, businesses and visitors to the city are our customers. Our objective is to provide certain products to them as effectively and efficiently as possible.
To its credit, the Menino administration has now begun to adopt this rhetoric. It used to be that budget presentations to the City Council were input driven. How much money is being spent in a certain department? Is this more, or less than last year?
But over the last two years there has been a marked shift away from this. The budget presentations now increasingly focus on measures such as customer satisfaction and results: what is it that we actually bought with the money we spent?
The second change is that, having thought of itself as a business, government must now behave as a business. That means making dramatic managerial and operational changes.
Rarely does a business try to do everything itself. Businesses contract out for services. Similarly, Boston needs to move to competitive bidding for the provision of city services. Right now, virtually all city services are delivered by the City itself. Need a handbook printed? The City has its own print shop. The Mayor's auto needs an oil change? The City has its own auto shop. Need a new yield sign? The City has its own sign shop.
Meanwhile, there are over 700 printers listed in the Yellow Pages. "Auto repairs and services" occupies 14 pages in the Yellow Pages and "Signs" takes up six pages.
When competitive bidding has been tried in other cities, such as Indianapolis, the services have improved, those delivering the services have become more accountable and the financial savings have been dramatic. Frequently, by the way, the successful bidders are the public employees unions themselves who, once freed from stifling bureaucratic controls, are often in the best position to figure out how to deliver services more effectively.
A related change would be to reorganize management of services. Government, like many hierarchical institutions, has a constant tendency to centralize and compartmentalize. But centralization stifles innovation and removes managers from the needs of those they are supposed to serve. Imagine, for example, a strategy of decentralization that assigned managers responsibility for delivering all services to one particular neighborhood. That person would aggressively monitor the needs of the area and have the authority to put whatever resources he or she chose to use to meet residents needs.
City governments exist to serve the city. Failure to do the best we possibly can hurts all of us as taxpayers, residents and citizens of a city that can, and should, be better.