By Janet Chenard, Budget and Financial Planning Manager, City of Corvallis

It goes without saying that an engaged citizenry is both a blessing and a challenge when it comes to local government service provision. Users of the services provided by the City of Corvallis are decidedly outspoken, generally highly educated, and certainly incredibly participatory as a community. Corvallis citizens have also proven themselves to be very supportive of city services, provided they have access to the information needed to make reasoned decisions, as evidenced by the recent overwhelming (65%) approval of a three-year property tax operating levy in May 2011.

So communication is obviously the key – but how can governments afford sufficient staff time, let alone dollars, to get the message out about how effectively (or not) services are being provided in a City, given the ongoing weak national and local economic climate as well as the shrinking funds available from tax payers? The City of Corvallis has found that part of the trick is to utilize existing mechanisms and reports, or spin-offs from such documents, to maximize efficiencies in getting such information to citizens.

Performance Measurement History:
Corvallis was an early adopter of performance measurement and communication of same to its citizens and other stakeholders. Data, including efficiency and effectiveness measures, as well as goals and objectives, have been provided in the City’s budget document for over thirty years. However, with the advent of ICMA Center for Performance Measurement (CPM) membership, Corvallis has refined and improved not just the measures it tracks but has also found better ways to communicate their ramifications to the public. CPM was instrumental in causing staff to pull together comparator information in order to provide context for many statistics already being gathered.

Current Efforts
On an annual basis, the City updates eight tables in the department pages of its budget document with actual results for several ICMA core measures, and other key measures that pertain to desired outcomes and goals of the department and the overall organization. In FY 07-08, staff made several changes to the presentation and format of its measures. The first improvement was to expand the table of numbers and list of measures to include the corresponding management objectives as they in turn pertained to the City Council’s overarching goals of: Cost Efficiency; Community Involvement; Sustainability and Diversity. A narrative of key measures was added which explicitly helped readers determine whether the results presented were good or bad, and addressed ongoing trends and challenges being faced. These small changes netted the City national recognition through the Government Finance Officer Association’s (GFOA) annual Special Recognition program for Performance Measurement, beyond the usual Distinguished Budget Presentation award that the City has earned every year since it began applying in 1986. More importantly, the new presentation provided staff with something to which they could refer when boards and commissions as well as other stakeholders were looking for facts and data on service outcomes.

Beyond the budget document however, the City also produces other standard reports which over time have easily been modified to include more and better information regarding performance:

• Quarterly Operating Report: Within 45 days of each fiscal quarter-end, an operating report is produced in compliance with City Council Financial Policies. This report details quarterly results for the targeted performance measures as well as financial management results. Such updates can provide a timely wake-up for department directors and the City Manager, as well as Council members, to react to challenging or deteriorating situations. Alternatively, it may also provide for more current information that can be shared with individuals requesting such information, who may not be aware of improving efficiencies or volume in Library circulation levels, Fire calls per capita, etc.

• Annual Report Card: For the past two fiscal years, the City has changed the mechanism for publishing and sharing its annual citizen attitude survey (CAS) results. While compiling the CAS has been a staple in the City’s box of tools to get citizen feedback for fifteen years, with the 2008 move to the more standardized National Research Center’s (NRC) national citizen survey, Corvallis gained access to far more in the way of comparable data from other jurisdictions. To take advantage of better information on how levels of satisfaction with Corvallis services compared with similar cities, the City Manager’s Office coordinated the compilation of a report by the rest of the organization which tied in performance measures of those valued services and put it all in the context of the Council’s Vision 2020 statement. Once again, this demonstrates the viability of using a variety of existing pieces of performance data and pulling them together in a new format to present ideas from a slightly different and potentially more powerful perspective. The 2011 annual report card could not be distributed in the usual March timeframe due to the operating levy election timing of May, but will be published instead in July 2011.

• Budget in Brief: For the past several years, upon adoption of the budget, the City has issued a newsletter insert to provide an at-a-glance overview of budget performance expectations and estimates. A relatively affordable newsprint creation that again drew information directly from an existing source (the required publication of a budget document), but was very easy for the lay reader to pick up and assimilate high-level information about budgetary trends and challenges. In FY 10-11, with temporarily reduced staffing and tight timelines, the Finance department experimented with a self-published, online pdf version. While the plan is to revert to the more user-friendly newsprint version again in 2011, this was an approach that allowed for an important communication to occur within existing constraints.

• Annual departmental reports: Many City departments and divisions provide an annual report that communicates, among other things, how “well” they are doing relative to citizen expectations and historical trends. In a relatively safe community, these reports are often the only exposure the public has to information on how their tax dollars are assisting City livability from the perspective of Police and Fire department activities for example. Of particular note are the excellent graphics and trend information the Public Works department compiles annually to illustrate the organization’s improvements and success with the City’s sustainability program.

• Newspaper/website/commission meetings: While the City obviously has no control over what is published by the local newspaper, it is very important to strive for a positive relationship with the media. Ensuring that the Gazette-Times had available to it all the new and timely information as it was issued, certainly assisted the City with its dissemination of accurate public information during the FY 11-12 budget cycle. A much broader audience can be reached, particularly in today’s heavily online environment, than City staff could hope to reach at meetings or even on its own website, which may not be part of every citizen’s daily reading regime. Nevertheless, the availability of frequent public meetings, and a user-friendly website cannot be under-rated.

Looking to the Future
In conclusion, local government success in communicating with the public regarding accomplishments and/or failures with regard to service provision can be achieved by incorporating performance measurement into existing reports and documents. The efforts identified here were all undertaken by current staff – none of whom are trained in public relations or even communications. Rather, these results have come from regular employees brainstorming ideas and trying new venues. When something proves to be less successful, that effort is ended and something else is tried. Staff will continue to strive for improvement in content and distribution/penetration of such messages in the coming years.