Hitting the mark: communicating outcomes to the citizens.

• Author: Welsh, Susan

The keys to the success of the report card to the community published by the City of Long Beach were the careful selection of comparison cities and of performance measures plus the painstaking collection of benchmarking data.

Each year the Government Finance Officers Association bestows its prestigious Award for Excellence to recognize outstanding contributions in the field of government finance. The awards stress practical, documented work that offers leadership to the profession and promotes improved public finance. This article describes the 1997 winning entry in the Communications and Reporting subcategory of the Budgeting and Financial Planning category.

After years of being in the economic doldrums, heavily dependent on oil, aerospace, and defense, the City of Long Beach, California, (population 433,218) has begun a renaissance based on expanding retail and increasing tourism. At the same time, the city's industrial/manufacturing base is growing along with its international trade and health care. Long Beach is a city in transition.

In tune with the changing economic environment, in 1995 the city officials decided to find a new way to inform citizens - who both finance and use the end products - about the type and quality of services they were being provided and how their resources were being put to work. Budget resource allocation plans and other reports to the community had been published regularly in the past, and continue to be. These documents, however, do not often answer specific questions and are cumbersome in the amount of detail provided; they do not clearly explain what public money is being spent for and what citizens are getting in return.

The focus of this new document was to show impacts of budgetary decisions, highlighting the type and quality of services that were important to the community. It was to be written in a clear, concise manner with language and terms that would be understandable to one's next door neighbor. The objective was to provide a gauge to citizens, enabling them to measure the performance of their local government.

The assignment to create this new report to the citizens, which was named Hitting the Mark, was given to the Department of Financial Management's Budget Management Bureau. In Long Beach, as in most cities, revenue is limited and budgetary decisions have positive or negative effects in areas throughout the city's operations. The form of this new report to the citizens was therefore planned to allow these cause-and-effect situations to be readily identified and easily understood.

Locating Benchmark Data

Reporting performance was not new to the city of Long Beach - all departments had been providing performance measures that had been included in the published budget document for many years. The focus of Hitting the Mark, however, was to identify specific actions, determine specific outcomes, to measure these...