City to test its own efficiency

By Rachana Dixit

Published: July 8, 2008

City departments will soon be put under the efficiency microscope, but Charlottesville councilors have varying opinions on how far the examination should go.

During its Monday night meeting, councilors gave city staff the go-ahead to move forward with a quality of services and efficiency study for the city, which would broadly review internal departments in a four- to six-month timeline. Most councilors suggested that maintaining a broad study would be best, but councilor David Brown suggested doing a more prolonged review.

“I’m not necessarily as anxious to do it all at once,” said Brown, who thinks an in-depth study would be more thorough.

Brown also said it is important the study compares Charlottesville with communities with similar compositions, goals and challenges.

“It’s important that we compare apples to apples,” he said.

Councilors decided to possibly allow the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia to manage the study, using many former city and government officials to evaluate the city’s current efficiency and productivity.

Assistant City Manager Maurice Jones said the Weldon Cooper Center would be optimal to manage the study, namely because it would be able to stay within the $50,000 budgeted by the city.

The estimated study timeline would run starting Sept. 1 and last for roughly five months, with a final report being delivered by Feb. 1.

“There are currently several tools in place to evaluate how our overall management and efficiency are measuring up,” Jones said. But, he added, “We believe there is certainly room for a broader review.”

In a phone interview last week, Jones said the city began doing research for a study about two months ago after some councilors expressed an interest last fall. Jones said either a broad review of all departments could be completed at once, or the review could be staggered over the course of several years.

Several cities that completed similar studies were researched — including Memphis, Tenn.; Honolulu; Manchester, Conn.; Evansville, Ill.; and Pittsburgh — with costs ranging from $30,000 to more than $700,000.

Brown said he thinks studying people should be the biggest priority in the review.

“It seems to me that the big cost in government is people,” Brown said.

Councilor Satyendra Huja suggested that though the study will be approached from a more global perspective, in-depth reviews should be considered as needed.

Referring to the proposed study, Jones said, “Odds are in this we won’t have a lot of in-depth work.”

But regardless of the scope of the work, he said that asking the public questions about city services is important to gauge its success — especially since measuring the quality of a particular service is fairly abstract, a notion that Councilor Holly Edwards pointed out during Monday’s meeting.

“I think that’s one way of reaching out and bringing folks into the process,” Jones said.