Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene

A little under a year ago, Glendale Arizona’s City Council passed a proposal that terminated the position of the City Auditor, moving the city’s one auditor to a new city department, which now outsources its reviews and evaluations of the city’s agencies and services.  A manager and an audit committee, which include three city council members was established to oversee the new effort.

We occasionally did the same for cities and counties. The news in those days, unsurprisingly, was not happy.

For the most part, we’ve pointed to issues that require careful examination of the information to determine if its trustworthy or not.

But, as time has passed, we’ve come across a great many signals, easily spotted and identified, that point to quicker recognition that information should be scrutinized. Here are a half dozen examples:

We were asked to address ourselves to trends in performance management in states and localities over recent years. Having recently completed our book, Making Government Work: The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management, (to be released in January by Rowman & Littlefield), this was a topic that we had been thinking a great deal about over the last year, and thought we’d share some of the significant trends that we’ve discovered.

Here are six:

Yet boards and commissions are crucial to the effective and efficient delivery of services, complementing the more familiar local government structures consisting of city mayors, councils, and departments.