Protecting Priorities:
Why Good Management is Good Politics
October 3, 2008
Greetings from Maryland. I’m so very sorry that I can’t be with all of you this afternoon. We had a tragedy this past weekend in Maryland that involved one of our MedEvac helicopters and we lost some very dedicated and courageous first responders, who gave their lives in service to others, in trying to save the lives of others.
While you’re watching this video, unfortunately I’m attending a memorial service for one of these heroes this morning and I am, therefore, unable to be with you in Texas. And I hope you understand.
But in the spirit of government innovation, I will be sharing a few of the thoughts that I planned to share with you in person and I’ll be doing it through this video.
As you may know, I have the tremendous honor and privilege of being able to serve the people of the great State of Maryland as their Governor and before that I served as Mayor of the City of Baltimore.
A great historian, Arnold Toynbee, once wrote that man progresses in response to adversity. Well, we had no shortage of diversity eight years ago when we were handed the keys to a 16,000 person, $2 billion a year, operation known as the City Government of Baltimore. But with these keys came challenges and some of them were very, very big challenges.
For starters, we were battling one of the highest violent crime rates and one of the highest addiction rates in the nation. And after 30 years of that big problem, we also had one of the biggest population losses of any major city in America. So, therefore, we had fewer residents and a smaller tax base to combat what were growing problems.
Too often this left us a legacy of underperforming schools, underperforming and unresponsive city services, littered streets and alleys, and thousands of vacant buildings
-- and worse, a lot of vacant hearts and a lot of hopelessness about what we were capable of achieving as a people.
Our citizens, the great and diverse and resilient people of Baltimore, voted for change and they knew that our city’s survival depended on that change coming about as quickly as possible. And in Baltimore, a city with limited resources, we learned very quickly that progress was only possible if we took control of the compass and if we started measuring performance.
So guided by a talented and visionary man by the name of Jack Maple, formerly Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD, we started measuring not only the inputs of government, but, more importantly, the outputs. Because we felt that if the NYPD could successfully use ComStat, a computer pin-mapping to put crimes on the map and deploy police officers to those dots, then data collection and mapping technology could also work for everything else that our government does. So we created CitiStat and we began making progress again for the people of our city.
Now, data collection and mapping without action, of course, is pointless. That’s why ComStat tenets immediately became our four basic tenets of CitiStat. And you’ve all heard them by now -- timely accurate information shared by all, rapid deployment of resources, effective tactics and strategies, and relentless follow-up and assessment.
Through these strategies, we were able to empower our citizens to turn our city around in a relatively short period of time. Our kind host from Governing Magazine surmised that we were taking on performance on a scale that was never before seen in local government. And by the time we handed the keys of City Hall to the next administration of my successor, Mayor Sheila Dixon, together we had reversed four decades of seemingly insurmountable population loss and our city is now growing again.
Why is that? Because together we reduced violent crime by 40 percent, to its lowest levels in four decades. Together, with measuring performance, we backed up a 98 percent success rate in our guarantee that we’d fix all potholes in 48 hours. Together, we reduced the number of children exposed to dangerously high levels of lead poisoning by 65 percent.
Together, we identified and reclaimed more than 5,900 vacant homes and buildings for redevelopment and urban renewable by taking title, clear title. Together, we eliminated a backlog of cleaning and boarding operations, we reduced the average response time from 319 days to five days.
Together, we have more than quadrupled our city’s Rainy Day Fund and we actually earned an upgrade in our city’s bond rating. And we were able to cut the property tax rate to its lowest point in 30 years.
Now, while some may scoff at attacking potholes and crime and grime, I believe -- as does everyone in our administration -- that there are some basic aspirations that are really shared by all of humanity. Everybody wants to raise their kids in a neighborhood that’s becoming cleaner and safer and where the schools are improving. There’s no Democratic or Republican way to fill a pothole, no political ideology to picking up illegally dumped garbage or removing graffiti or cleaning an alley. You either do it or you don’t do it. Your city is either becoming safer or it’s becoming more dangerous.
Now, we didn’t create CitiStat in order to win kudos from Governing Magazine, but we deeply appreciate them. We did it to survive. And, more importantly, we did it to make progress in response to some pretty daunting adversity.
And because the keys to the State House in Annapolis came with a new set of challenges and adversity, today we are implementing those same performance measurement strategies and the setting goals in order to move our State forward.
When I became Governor almost two years ago, we began immediately applying the tenants of CitiStat to our new program -- you guessed it, StateStat. I wanted to share a few examples, things that we’re doing in the area of public safety, in particular.
Together, we are now sharing information and intelligence and integrating our efforts, not only across the various State departments and agencies that are supposed to be involved in public safety, but also across the various county and municipal jurisdictions that usually separate law enforcement and public safety efforts. We are using data-driven tactics and strategies now to deploy our resources more effectively in alignment with our county and municipal partners.
In our State, for example, the Governor controls the Department of Parole and Probation. At one of our very first meetings I asked, How many of the last 50 people charged with homicide in the City of Baltimore were actually supposedly under our State supervision by parole or probation at the time that they murdered another American in our State? The answer, two weeks later, was that 28 of these 50 were supposedly under our supervision.
What we’ve done is an analysis of all of those that are under our supervision, used a better diagnostic tool -- borrowed, actually, from another state -- and we’re now able to target our supervision with the creation of a new violence prevention initiative, with smaller caseloads for parole and probation agents to supervise the top 2,000 most violent offenders that we need to keep an eye on.
We’ve also been able to eliminate our inherited backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples. We’ve trained over 500 parole and probation agents in DNA collection. We’ve collected an additional 21,000 samples and what this has meant is that our law enforcement people at the local level have actually been able to solve more crimes. 348 positive matches have led to 88 arrests. The number of hits, that is to say matches, to either an offender or a crime scene -- we’ve had more in the last 18 months than we had in the last eight years. We are now seeing, at this point in our calendar year, a 20 percent reduction Statewide in homicides.
Public safety is just one of the areas, though, where performance-based strategies are helping us make progress. We’re also using these strategies to help us grow in smarter and more sustainable ways. We’re applying them to guide our various efforts at cleaning up and improving the health of the Chesapeake Bay. And we’re using performance-based governing strategies to save taxpayers money, while freeing up resources to devote to other priorities that are -- especially in these tough times.
In fact, StateStat has been instrumental in helping us identify and eliminate 700 government positions, it has helped us save $20 million in overtime costs and it’s produced over $20 million in increased Medicaid fraud recoveries.
It’s my belief that the lessons that we learned in Baltimore of declaring goals and measuring performance in pursuit of those goals, are the same lessons that we’re now applying in Maryland. And they are lessons that, quite frankly, can be applied at any level to any large human endeavor anywhere in the world. You have to have the guts to measure performance openly and transparently and the guts to declare goals.
And although we contend that good management is good politics, performance based management is also truly omni-partisan, it is apolitical, and it’s essential for making progress for the people that we all serve.
I want to encourage all of you to please continue to believe that our government actually can be a force for good in this world, that our tomorrows can be better than our todays, if only we had the guts to declare goals and to measure performance in pursuit of those goals. And remember that God wants every partial victory.
Thanks a lot.
