Just prior to a presentation about potential 311 service in Springfield last week before the city’s Finance Control Board, the new director of the municipal CityStat program, Paul Foster (pictured, with control board executive director Stephen Lisauskas), finally had his chance, after two previously scheduled and canceled presentations, to inform board members about the program and his role in bringing efficiency, effectiveness and dollar savings to city departments.

Foster, who until recently commuted from Springfield to Boston for a policy analyst job at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, worked previously at the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, based in West Springfield, as a senior planner.

In that role, Foster was integral to the drafting of an extensive document (PDF) and related slideshow presentation (PDF) prepared by the PVPC (pictured, with Timothy Brennan, presenting the data) in advance of the September 2006 visit of an Urban Land Institute advisory panel. The work summarized the current condition of Springfield’s economic and demographic status and compared its trends to those of peer cities.

In his new job, Foster told the board, he is in charge of leading what he called a process—begun in September and now more routine, since January—that happens to involve a lot of tracking and assembling data, and meeting monthly or so with heads of city departments to follow up on problem issues after they are flagged.

What CitiStat is doing for Springfield

“CitiStat is part of the ongoing efforts locally to improve the government,” control board executive director Stephen Lisauskas told the board. “In short order, we’ve seen, through CitiStat, a seven percent [reduction] of sick time use in one department, a three percent reduction in another—and that’s only after a short few months of having the program in place.”

He continued to say that CitiStat builds a management structure to analyze services and direct resources to local priorities. “One of the mayor’s strong priorities is improving the quality of life,” Lisauskas pointed out, “and CitiStat builds that management structure and allows the orientation of the city to pursue those goals.”

The Facilities Management Department, he added, has seen a near doubling of work orders recently, apparently based on the tracking and management of data.

“CitiStat is often thought of as a technological initiative,” Foster explained. “It really is a process. We use software to do our analysis.”

Regular city department evaluation meetings

“The purpose of the process is to create [a context] for the city departments to be held accountable for their use of resources and for the quality of services [they render],” Foster said.

Analysis entails looking regularly at each city department’s data, and then once a month, or once every other month, holding a CitiStat meeting to discuss the data. Participants in those meetings, Foster said, include his staff, as well as staff from the control board, the mayor’s office, and other city departments. “Basically we go through data,” he explained, “and, really, three types of data come up at each of those meetings.”

The three types of data, as Foster described, are in the following categories:

Finance. CitiStat staff examine how current spending matches up against the budget, for example, and where there may be potential deficits looking ahead.

Personnel. Staff track numbers such as workplace injuries and the utilization of overtime and sick leave.

Performance. Such data includes information like outstanding work orders in the Facilities Management Department, how many potholes have been reported or repaired, or how many people are visiting the city’s libraries (examples below). Such data can vary widely for each department, depending on its output or type of service rendered.

“Sometimes we have to figure out where there are inefficiencies,” Foster said, “and where there are issues we need to work on. We are very proactively tracking what comes up in these meetings. If an issue is raised, or a next step is identified, we’re making sure that at the next meeting, we ask the question, ‘Where is that issue now?’”

Foster said the regularly scheduled meetings with city departments and CitiStat staff began in January, and as of March 3, there were 18 meetings. “We do about three or four a week,” he said. “On that schedule, we’re able to bring in each city department every month, or every other month.”

Some issues that have arisen

Foster said a number of different issues are being examined by CitiStat staff to determine where efficiency can be increased. A brief summary:

• Examining citywide call forms. How many times are people calling the city? What are they calling for?

• Identifying number of non-classroom spaces in city public schools that are being used to hold classes (working alongside the Facilities Management Department).
• Examining the “degree of loss” from city libraries.
• Researching possible citywide guidelines about the monitoring of sick leave, for managers and others, to clarify responsibilities with respect to employee sick leave use.

• Developing workplace safety trainings, and employing additional workplace safety trainings, that tend to reduce numbers of injuries.

• Establishing injury review panels in an attempt to take a look back at injuries that occurred, and attempt to identify what might have prevented them.
• Researching whether to use Springfield’s still fairly new Connect-CTY program as a reverse 911 system, to let people know, for example, that a parking ban is in effect, in cooperation with the Department of Public Works. “I believe for the last three or four snow storms, that’s been used, and people have gotten that information,” Foster added.
• Researching the impact of positions have been held vacant for a lack of municipal vehicles.
• Evaluating the effectiveness of School Department programs to orient and mentor first-year teachers. “How do we know the programs to orient those folks are working?” Foster suggested.

Foster’s task is to determine ways new efficiencies can be in place and the city can save money. By way of example, he said, “If we were to reduce the amount of sick leave used, and the amount of injuries, by about ten percent each, that would be a savings of about a million dollars a year to the city.”

Simply paying attention makes a huge difference

Later in the presentation, City Council President Bud Williams asked Foster to return to the subject of sick time leave. He wanted to clarify how examining sick time leave data might save “millions of dollars,” querying, “How is that done through this system?”

Foster replied, “A lot of it is simply by paying attention to it.”

“One of our goals,” he continued, “when we [work] with department heads is to make sure it’s used appropriately, based on whatever union contracts or other [contracts are in place]. One of the things we’re trying to focus on is that it is being monitored, it is being looked at, so that savings come in.”

CitiStat is ensuring that departments are monitored appropriately, Foster underlined, to be certain that any sick leave policy in place is not being abused, and that its implementation is “tightened up.”

Williams wondered at what point—for example, three days into a sick leave—the city might have the right to ask an employee about his or her status, and confirm that the leave is legitimate. Foster responded that it’s the role of each city department to work with its employees, and within the parameters of any union rules that might apply. “My role is to make sure it happens,” he said.

Ongoing research on issues that crop up

Outside the regular meetings with city department heads, Foster said his staff works on research projects related to issues that arise, sometimes stemming from the meetings themselves, and sometimes, one imagines, related to data they might find noteworthy.

“For example,” Foster indicated, “we’ve looked at the numbers of workplace injuries. So one of the things to come out of that is questions about, well, what’s causing these injuries?” He supplied the board with graphical data showing open worker’s compensation claims, sorted by cause of injury (below).

It indicates that slip-and-fall accidents are the most common of claims as of the end of 2007, followed by two categories of “other” and plenty of lifting/carrying injuries.

Staff will examine what types of injuries employees in city departments are experiencing, and which kinds are causing the most lost time. Related questions arise, such as whether there is anything the city can do to protect its employees from injury.

Another piece of graphical data Foster supplied to the control board showed Housing Code Enforcement performance, on two variables, comparing fiscal years 2007 and 2008. The variables measured are median days from complaint to first inspection, which appear to have increased slightly between the two years, and median days from complaint to case closure, which have shortened significantly between the two years.

CitiStat in other cities

Foster also offered a summary of CitiStat in other US locations. “It traces its history to the mid-1990s—the CompStat program in New York City,” he said. “Within the New York City police department, it’s often referred to as ‘cops on the dots,’ the use of mapping and data analysis to [aid] policing.”

In 2000, he continued, the mayor of Baltimore took the concept to another level by applying it not only to the police department, but to all areas of city government.

As Foster explained, “He took the idea that frequent and regular analysis of data would be useful in terms of [determining] what’s going on in the city, what could be done better, and where are efficiencies that could be found.”

Since then, Foster said, CitiStat has been adopted in communities such as Atlanta, Buffalo, Columbus Ohio, Providence, San Francisco, and Syracuse. “Closer to home,” he added, “it’s been adopted in Somerville. There was also recently, I believe, an editorial in the Boston Globe about AmesStat in Amesbury. That’s one of the smaller communities that applies CitiStat, and it’s being used very effectively.”

In the first seven years CitiStat was used in Baltimore, Foster said, the city’s savings were estimated at $350 million. Baltimore officials describe the foundation of CitiStat as “four tenets,” which are accurate and timely intelligence, effective tactics and strategies, rapid deployment of resources, and relentless follow-up and assessment.

As he pointed out with respect to Springfield, much of it can be attributed to simple monitoring: the art of paying attention and thinking strategically, not cutting services.

About $30 million of Baltimore’s savings, he said, “simply comes from regularly looking at expenditure of overtime, and identifying areas where they [could hire] staff or [implement other efforts] to reduce the utilization of overtime.”

Foster gave another example of how other cities now track their service levels on a regular basis in an attempt to improve performance: in Baltimore, they now track pothole calls.

“Since they’ve implemented both their 311 program and a CitiStat program,” Foster said, “the number of calls about potholes increased from about 2,000 to 10,000 a year, and they still filled 95 percent of those potholes, within 48 hours of the phone call. That’s the kind of data, and the kind of analysis of the data, that’s been used to improve performance.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Demographics, Development, Discussion, Events, Finance, Finance Control Board, Housing, Libraries, Meeting records, Planning and design, Quality of life, Springfield, Studies and reports, Think tanks, Urban Compass.