Government - Ledger - Booker borrows idea to cut city's red tape

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Published in the Star-Ledger, Thursday, May 11, 2006

Booker borrows idea to cut city's red tape
Next Newark mayor likes Baltimore system

Thursday, May 11, 2006

BY KATIE WANG AND JEFFERY C. MAYS
Star-Ledger Staff

In Newark, residents have come to view City Hall as a symbol of inertia. Simple tasks such as paying a gas bill or parking ticket easily become complicated or aggravating. Visitors talk about lackluster customer service, long lines and poor results.

Mayor-elect Cory Booker made efficient government one of the hallmarks of his campaign, and once he takes over City Hall July 1, he said, he has the solution: CitiStat.

The troubleshooting program is an increasingly popular system that puts city services under the public microscope. Booker's mention of the data-driven program, developed in Baltimore and adapted by other cities, is one of several hints he has dropped about the future of Newark under his administration.

Yesterday, the day after his election victory, Booker said he spoke to Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley in the morning about CitiStat. The conversation was one of several Booker had with other cities' mayors as he moved toward the transition period.

Booker said he is still in the process of assembling his transition team, which will include a mix of Newark residents and outsiders. He said he planned to introduce the team Monday.

While Booker was traveling around Newark yesterday with his council slate in tow, some employees at City Hall expressed concern about their job security.

Booker said he welcomes the worried employees into his administration, even as he plans to conduct national searches for a new police chief and police director. He did not mention any other high-ranking posts.

"City workers are full of ideas and insights," he said. "We will rely on the wisdom of City Hall workers."

However, Booker promised during the campaign to change City Hall from being a place that offers obstacles instead of solutions -- a common criticism of Newark governance.

"There's no one person who can get things done," said Rahaman Muhammad, president of the Service Employees International Union, Local 617. "In the past, you had to go directly to the mayor to get things done."

City Hall, said Muhammad, operated in a murky manner, with confusion about who made decisions and how they were made.

"City Hall needs a clear set of standards and a clear chain of command," he said.

CitiStat is already up and running in places including Buffalo and Syracuse, N.Y., and has been credited for slicing the red tape most people associate with city government.

"It's a great program," said Carl Fellicio, vice president for the Council for Excellence in Government, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, D.C. "It's going to become of these innovations that become institutionalized. In two years, it's going to be strange if a city doesn't have CitiStat."

The data-heavy style of management has its roots in the New York Police Department, which uses a program called CompStat to track crime in the city. Using a computerized map-pinning system, the police said they were able to shift resources accordingly and reduce crime.

Other cities, including Newark, followed New York's lead and used a similar system. But in Baltimore, O'Malley proposed expanding the idea to all aspects of city government -- from the parks department to the health department. He pitched the idea in April 2000, and today CitiStat is the central nervous system of Baltimore.

"What we think we've been able to do is bring a much more focused and consistent approach to what we do," said Matt Gallagher, the director of Baltimore's CitiStat program.

The idea is a marriage of modern technology and old-fashioned city governance. Before CitiStat, residents in Baltimore would call City Hall with their complaints and hope the problems eventually would be resolved. Under CitiStat, if they complain about graffiti, garbage or potholes, a service request number is assigned to their complaint, to keep track of it.

City employees also log the complaints into a database for the mayor and supervisors to review every two weeks. If the complaints about trash or unfilled potholes stack up, the manager of that department has to answer to O'Malley.

The database is also posted on the Internet, so residents can see which departments are slacking and which ones are working.

"Martin O'Malley used the principles of CompStat and made sure parks got their lawns mowed and trash picked up -- the things that a mayor has to be responsible for," said Fellicio. "He's made it open and transparent, and he's also made all of his managers accountable."

Baltimore's Gallagher said the program cost about $450,000 when implemented a half-dozen years ago and has saved the city $350 million since. After its inception, a central hotline was added to handle the complaints -- residents dial 311 -- and the city issued a 48-hour guarantee to fill potholes.

The new system, though, was a culture shock for Baltimore employees, said Gallagher.

"It was our experience here that people were not that accustomed to that level of accountability and transparency," said Gallagher. "They were unaccustomed to talking about their performance in specific ways."

Matt Crenson, chairman of the political science department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said employees scoff at CitiStat. "They make fun of it," he said.

But other cities have taken notice. San Francisco and Birmingham, Ala., are among the cities that have adopted similar programs. In 2004, Harvard University, along with the Council for Excellence in Government, recognized CitiStat as one of the most innovative government programs in the country.

According to Baltimore officials, it takes several months to get the system off the ground.

In Newark, Booker has not said when he would implement CitiStat or how far-reaching the system would be.

During the campaign, he recounted stories from residents about City Hall inefficiencies that discouraged them from going there.

Councilman Augusto Amador, a former manager at PSE&G, said one of the most common complaints he heard about City Hall was that residents do not like going there to pay their tax or water bills because of the long lines.

Amador's solution was to set up a separate office -- a "Little City Hall" in his neighborhood just for that purpose. The idea was a hit. He and the city collected more than $1 million in tax bills from Jan. 1 to Jan. 10. His staffers in turn delivered the money to City Hall. Other council members adopted the idea.

"The time frame to pay a bill or get a license is too long. We need to look at what causes delays and improve them," said Amador.

That's what Keisha Alston, 32, wanted to know yesterday as she stood in line for a birth certificate at the Office of Vital Statistics.

"The line was so long," she said. "But it's always long."

Staff writer Brad Parks contributed to this report.

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