There is a pothole on my daily commute that recently has been getting bigger and bigger. Though I have twice called the municipality where it is located, for the past three weeks nothing has happened.
Now imagine if one could go online to a web site, alert the municipality to a pothole and then track the progress being made on that service request. That information shouldn’t just be available for the individual lodging the complaint but accessible to anyone so that every citizen can see how fast it takes government to respond to a problem. One can imagine local fiscal watchdogs tracking that information and reporting on the average length of time it takes for a pothole to be fixed, which streets seem to have to the biggest problems, or how the level of service is changing.
Soon, residents of New York City (NYC) will not have to imagine that future. Even though NYC faces serious budget problems, and greater transparency may embarrass some inside City Hall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg made greater government accountability a key part of his 2008 State of New York City Address. Starting this summer ordinary New Yorkers will be able to log onto the City’s web site and track the status of complaints citizens have lodged with the City’s 311 telephone hotline. If they ask for a pothole to be fixed, a tree to be trimmed or want to report that there is a graffiti problem on City-owned property, they or any other visitor to the City’s web site will be able to check how long it takes for the problem to be fixed.
The commitment Bloomberg made to transparency doesn’t stop there. NYC is posed to introduce a new accountability tool called “Citywide Performance Reporting.” City residents will be able to log online to the city’s web site and monitor how the City departments are performing on over 500 difference measurements, including actual fire response times, noise complaints, and the number of trees planted by NYC’s parks department. They can evaluate for themselves whether service levels are getting better, getting worse or staying the same. Given the challenges and delays that the City of San Diego has had in developing performance measures, one might suggest that it is worth a long distance call or two to NYC to get the list of the quantitative measurements NYC is using. Bloomberg also committed to working with the independent office of the Public Advocate to conduct the largest public opinion survey that NYC has ever done – garnering input from over 100,000 New Yorkers as to how well they think their city is performing.
Finally, one of the most innovative ideas is Bloomberg’s Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT), which is a roving team of code enforcement officers who are tasked with getting out into the community and evaluating conditions on a block-by-block basis. Bloomberg committed in his State of the City Address to bring the community into that process and allow them to view the reports and photographic evidence online and actually see the conditions that the SCOUT team is finding and weigh in whether the reports truly reflect conditions on the ground.
Transparency and accountability are more than just buzz words. They are positive ways to help rebuild trust with a jaded and disillusioned citizenry that thinks that government doesn’t work. Such policies treat the citizenry with respect and acknowledge that often they see things that, as outsiders, those within the system overlook. At a recent conference I attended, I heard about the state of Kansas posting on its web site details about every payment it makes. The government official charged with that project talked glowingly about turning citizens of the sunflower state into 2.7 million separate auditors and government watchdogs.
Modern information technology has made it easier to take these steps. In a study of accountability and transparency, the National Taxpayers Union determined that the costs of such efforts are usually modest. It rarely requires generating new data but rather releasing for public consumption information that too often is locked away from public view.
Efforts to increase transparency and accountability have never been more important to the American polity. Distrust of government is at an all time high. Too many of our citizens believe that elections on American Idol are more important and fairer than the elections of our elected officials. Too many are reconciled to a government that they think does little more than spin and disassemble the truth. That cynicism makes it all the more difficult for consensus to be forged. Letting some sunshine in and going the extra step toward showing citizens the activities of the public sector is a good way of helping reconnect the people to their government. For a democracy, it is difficult to think of many other tasks that are more important.
Reader Feedback
What's good for the goose... Says:
Now if we can only get all of those unresponsive and abusive corporations to make a similar commitment to transparency and accountability.... What's good for the goose and all that, no?
You buy a computer and it crashes. Tough luck. You pay for an airline ticket to get you to a defined place by a time certain, and they cancel your flight and let you swing in the wind. Business as usual. Your mortgage broker does the old bait-and-switch at closing so that he "earns" a bigger commission. How awful.
Please consider balancing your instinctive distrust of government with well-founded disgust with the corporate model of service delivery. It will make you more credible.
February 1, 2008 at 2:00 PM
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Now if we can only get all of those unresponsive and abusive corporations to make a similar commitment to transparency and accountability.... What's good for the goose and all that, no?
You buy a computer and it crashes. Tough luck. You pay for an airline ticket to get you to a defined place by a time certain, and they cancel your flight and let you swing in the wind. Business as usual. Your mortgage broker does the old bait-and-switch at closing so that he "earns" a bigger commission. How awful.
Please consider balancing your instinctive distrust of government with well-founded disgust with the corporate model of service delivery. It will make you more credible.