Councilors: Just how efficient was city study?

Was the efficiency study done on the Charlottesville government everything it was expected to be? Not exactly, some city officials say.

“In all fairness, we had to start somewhere,” Councilor Holly Edwards said. “I think there will be a lot of lessons learned from this. But the biggest question is, how efficient was the efficiency study?”

The $50,000 Quality of Service and Efficiency Study was commissioned last year by the City Council, and the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service spent roughly five months sifting through documents and conducting interviews to figure out just how the Charlottesville government is faring. In many respects, the answer to that question was that local officials are doing exactly what they should be.

The City Council is set to hold a work session to discuss specific recommendations on May 20. Meanwhile, the staff has already started working on another performance management initiative — Plan, Perform and Perfect, or P3. That program is designed to evaluate progress of various programs, improve governmental transparency, create a more comprehensive budget process and generally make the city government more efficient.

Councilors said previously that the efficiency study would be especially handy with each passing budget cycle, and they also said that many praises and valuable recommendations were outlined. In spite of that, they also expressed feelings that they wished the study had provided a little more insight.

Councilor David Brown said his main disappointment was that the study conducted interviews with several seasoned government officials to see how the city was stacking up.

“Bringing in people at the end of a career in managing civic affairs doesn’t necessarily bring in new thinking,” he said. Brown said he was happy that officials got some solid recommendations to work with, but a younger vision might have been useful.

“My biggest issue was that it was a peer evaluation,” he said. “It all came from the same point of view that we generally come from.”

According to the study’s scope, budgets were also reviewed to try to identify reductions as early as this year in each city department. But many of the suggestions in the presented final report do not include information on current spending or how much could be saved.

“I’m just looking for, I guess, hard data,” Councilor Julian Taliaferro said.

The study, for example, said that of Virginia’s 39 cities, Charlottesville ranks No. 1 for the highest per capita expenses related to social services and welfare. It does not give an actual amount for how much the city spends, nor does it say in the report how much money would be conserved by placing the city’s Comprehensive Services Act administration under the Department of Social Services, one of the study’s recommendations.

The study also included other standings for Charlottesville — such as ranking No. 6 and No. 8, respectively, in public safety and parks and recreation expenses per capita.

Taliaferro said the scarcity of specific figures was “sort of disappointing to me, in a way.”

“That was what I was hoping would come out of it,” he said.

Assistant City Manager Maurice Jones said, though, that the study was designed to take a broad look at city services.

“I think from the beginning, it was always meant to be a more general look at the quality of the services we have and the opportunities for efficiencies,” he said.

There are instances when precise financial data is used to back up certain recommendations. In the study’s section that discusses school funding, raw figures show how much the city has spent per pupil over a 10-year period.

Brown said he did not have concerns about the amount of data, saying he thought the study was meant to examine the bigger picture of which direction the city government should move in. When Jones first proposed the study to the body last year, he said that was the approach that was decided.

“I don’t think we expected them to tell us how much we could save,” Brown said.

Jones said many of the recommendations require more research. Once that is completed, he said, the exact cost savings could be determined.

“It takes time to determine whether or not those recommendations or opportunities are valid and would work for the city,” Jones said.

Councilors agreed that there are many recommendations that are useable for the city government. Mayor Dave Norris said that when councilors first received the report a few months ago, he thought the presentation contained a lot of “cheerleading” for the city government. Edwards agreed, saying she wished the study had been a little tougher.

“That’s good to hear, obviously,” Norris said. “But we didn’t hire them to tell us how pretty we are.”

Once he read through the entire report, Norris said he discovered that there were many good proposals that could be acted upon. Although he has not sifted through the report for a while, Councilor Satyendra Huja said he too believed there were measures that could be implemented.

“I think we’re going to find a lot of good ideas there,” Norris said.