Seeing eye to eye: performance measures that matter to citizens.

• Author: Ruggini, John
• Position: THE BOOKSHELF

Listening to the Public: Adding the Voices of the People to Government Performance

Published by Fund for the City of New York www.fcny.org

2005; 102 pages; $17

Citizen participation has often been the square peg that public administrators try to squeeze into the round holes of government, whether it is for strategic planning, budgeting, land-use planning, or other key processes. This is especially true when it comes to performance measurement. Most participation is input driven (citizen satisfaction surveys) or output driven (annual performance reports). While both are important components of a performance measurement system, neither impact the design of the system or influence what is actually measured. Barbara J. Cohn Berman's Listening to the Public presents the results of a multiyear research project conducted by the Fund for the City of New York that provides local governments with a rounder peg that has the potential to greatly influence the design of their performance measurement systems.

Taking its cue from private sector market research practices, the Fund's Center on Municipal Government Performance set out to listen to the citizens of New York City through focus groups, surveys, and interviews over a six-year period between 1996 and 2001 to determine how the public perceived local government performance. Overall, researchers found participants to be knowledgeable about public services and realistic in their expectations. Their opinions were shaped by their own personal experiences and most critically influenced by their interactions with government employees and agencies. Most interestingly, the results suggest that citizens often evaluate governmental performance differently than do the governments themselves. While governments tend to report inputs (number of tons of salt spread), outputs (number of lane-miles plowed), and efficiency measures (dollars per lane mile of street plowed), citizens are most interested in the quality of the service provided. Indeed, their perception of service often crosses departmental boundaries to which most performance measures are often restricted.

While these results are interesting, they are not necessarily surprising. The value of Berman's work is her methodology and its potential widespread application and impact. During the focus groups, participants were provided brief descriptions of 30 different city responsibilities so that all had an equal base level of understanding. Participants then...