The three-year project in Iowa shows that citizen input can add a lot to the exercise of performance measurement that has been driven primarily by managers and budgeters for decades. Citizen input increases the political credibility of the performance measures and helps increase the likelihood that the information is used by elected officials in decision-making. How- ever, these successes do come at a cost. Through the experience in the Iowa project, we have identified the following challenges:
1. Attracting and sustaining citizen interest in a somewhat technical process and the ability to develop representative performance teams.
2. Building the comfort level for city officials to participate with citizens.
Table 19.4 Presentation of Performance Targets to the Council
Do departments present performance targets (i.e., what they will do in the future) to you annually or biennially?
Number of
respondents No
Only a few departments
All or almost
all departments Don’t know CIPA cities 25 4 (16.0%) 6 (24.0%) 14 (56.0%) 1 (4.0%) Non-CIPA cities 79 24 (32.9%) 13 (16.5%) 36 (45.6%) 6 (7.6%) Note: Four officials did not respond to the question.
3. Building a viable and lively process of developing and prioritizing performance measures.
4. Identifying data collection methods, including the exploration of how citizens could play a role in the generation of data.
5. The ability to transfer the measures and data on the measures to the decision making processes.
19.5.1 Creating Citizen Interest in the CIPA Process
As previously mentioned, there are diverse mechanisms to recruit citizens to participate in CIPA. From the experience of the Iowa project, it does not appear as if one method is more successful than others in getting citizens to participate. However, when examining the ability to sustain members, it seems that cities using existing advisory committees as the recruitment base are more likely to sustain a higher level of participation over time.
For example, cities such as Clive, Marion and Urbandale adopted this method and generally held the interest of a higher percentage of the original participants. Des Moines also fared well as it relied on the existing neigh- borhood umbrella organization known as Des Moines Neighbors to play an active role in appointing citizens in the CIPA process.
Another challenge in sustaining citizen participants’ interest is to balance the time invested in orientation and the time spent in substantive discussion about performance measures. An obvious failure in the initial phase of the project was that too much time was spent on orienting the team about city operations, performance measurement, and discussion about the rep- resentativeness of the team. As a result, some participants felt that the meetings did not go into the substance of the program and dropped out after a few meetings. Hence, how to organize a meeting meaningfully has a direct impact on citizen participation. Based on this experience, a facilitator should manage the discussion process so that a particular service area can be handled within two or three meetings, each lasting about 90 minutes.
19.5.2 Building the Comfort Level for City Officials to Participate
This area is another challenge faced by the CIPA process, which emphasizes partnership among citizens, elected officials, and city staff. For elected offi- cials, the CIPA process was more natural because engaging with citizens is central to their job nature. Working directly with citizens is a greater chal- lenge for many departmental staff. Initially, departmental representatives seemed to be more reluctant to become actively engaged. This could be
Public Participation in Local Performance Measurement and Budgeting g 559
somewhat attributed to the uncertainty about the process and their role in that process, and they did not want to be perceived by citizens as capturing the process. Some of the staff therefore played a passive role as ‘‘experts’’
on the service by only offering answers to questions, rather than serving as contributors or as equal partners with citizens in identifying critical elements or measures. The situation, however, changed in all performance teams once there was a strong trust built between citizens and city staff, and citizens welcomed staff representatives to contribute ideas. The realization by city staff that CIPA was not an individual personnel evaluation, but rather a process aimed at identifying performance measures for programs and services, also helped them become more open in the discussion.
Based on the Iowa experience we believe that it is feasible to build a partnership among citizens, city staff and elected officials in developing performance measures. However, the atmosphere of meetings has to be maintained as cordial, constructive, and open, the content of the discus- sion has to focus on the performance measures of programs and services rather than on city policies and personnel evaluation, and there has to be a certain degree of trust among the three participating parties. An external facilitator from a university or a non-profit organization may be helpful to build these environmental factors.
19.5.3 Building a Viable and Lively Process of Developing and Prioritizing Performance Measures
The ‘‘critical element’’ approach as a way to help citizens think about what is important to them in a service area is extremely helpful to the CIPA process.
The Iowa experience shows that this is an excellent link between citizens’
general concerns and performance measures, because it allows citizens and city staff who are not familiar with performance measures to first express the idea of performance in their own words. The process takes time, but it certainly facilitates the later process of identifying performance measures.
There are also challenges in the process of writing up the performance measures. In most of the Iowa cities, the performance teams worked with their facilitators to write their own performance measures and then asked the project staff to review and make suggestions. In a couple of cities, however, the performance teams asked the project staff to show them existing performance measures used by other cities in the country after they developed the critical elements, and then chose the performance measures that best matched their critical elements. The experience suggests that there is more than one approach to identifying performance measures, depending on the familiarity of citizens with the idea of performance measures and their willingness to invest time and thought in the process.
19.5.4 Identification of Data Collection Methods
Once the process moves into data collection, the challenge of CIPA is primarily loaded on the administrative staff. Most cities actually collect a lot of performance data through their operating and reporting routines, but they often ignore them after the data are collected and do not spend time to organize, analyze, and report the data to help program and policy decision-making. The CIPA process provides new incentives for staff to re-think what and how data should be collected, and how managers may use them meaningfully. This often requires managers and staff to have some basic statistical training. Also, many need orientation about survey designs and analysis because this is a common tool for performance measurement. In addition, many need to work more closely with their information technology staff to find out how they can retrieve and re-organize many existing data to produce meaningful analyses. These challenges can be serious in smaller cities that have greater personnel and technological capacity constraints. External assistance from universities or private consultants may be necessary to train the staff to overcome these problems.
19.5.5 Transferring Performance Measures and Data to Decision Makers
The final set of challenges is to transfer the measures and data to the decision makers. This may be the most critical step in guaranteeing the long-run success of CIPA. Failure of the decision makers to appreciate the value of performance measures can undermine the credibility of the entire process in the eyes of citizens and makes them question the need to participate in the process. To overcome this challenge, the performance teams themselves, not the city staff, should report their meeting results before their city councils regularly. City officials and citizens should also engage the mass media, such as local newspapers, to report about the process and results. It is important to publicize the effort and results of CIPA, so that performance measurement is not just an internal managerial exercise, but also a communicative platform and policy planning tool for decision-makers.