Winston-Salem's participation in the North Carolina performance measurement project.

• Author: Jones, Ann

How did involvement in the North Carolina project affect the jurisdictions involved? One city's experience shows how the hard work produced unexpected benefits.

At the end of the 1994 winter meeting of the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association in Durham, the budget director for the City of Winston-Salem suggested that the members of the association form a consortium to develop comparable service cost and performance data. This suggestion came at a time when Winston-Salem and other North Carolina cities were already participating in national benchmarking studies but finding the results obscure and the programs costly. Cost-calculating methods and performance measurements developed cooperatively with nearby jurisdictions might yield results that would be truly comparable and might allow differences to be explained.

The other budget directors expressed interest - both those from larger cities and those from large counties. Some of the association members from medium-size and small cities and counties also wanted to know how they could benefit from this type of project. By the time the association met in the summer of 1995, the membership was ready to commit to the project. (For detailed information on the project, see the article on p. 29 of this issue.)

Collecting the Data

The large cities participating in Phase I of the performance measurement project formed a steering committee to determine which services would be studied and what data would be collected. The participants were all in close agreement as to which services were top priority: sanitation, police, and streets. The committee started out with the objective of studying all programs within these three areas; however, the project participants soon realized how time-consuming this would be and decided to focus on the following programs within the three broad service areas: residential refuse collection, yard waste and leaf collection, household recycling, police patrol, police investigations, emergency communications, and street maintenance. The types of information that the project required were service definitions, cost data, and performance measurements.

Service Definitions. The steering committee worked hard to define each program as specifically as possible, because the definitions dictated exactly what cost data and other information would be included. For example, in residential refuse collection, the original program definition was limited to the collection of...