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Supervisor Gavin Newsom chairs a working group made up of
a few city agencies whose directors have volunteered to work toward systematically
applying modern management techniques to their operations. This is a job
for an administrator, not a legislator, but there is no one in the executive
branch who considers it his or her role.
Recently, the Recreation and Park Department announced the availability
for public comment of its draft strategic plan for bringing the city’s
parks and recreation facilities back up to an acceptable level. Such planning
is almost never performed by city agencies. The plan resulted from a Newsom-and-citizen-sponsored
initiative passed in 1999, which required strategic planning as part of
a bond measure. The new Municipal Transportation Agency, uniquely among
city agencies, now publishes a broad range of performance measures and
plans to achieve specific milestones for improvement on a published timeline.
This, too, was the result of a citizen initiative process. The city’s
sustainability plan, created at the impetus of private citizens and passed
by the Board of Supervisors in 1997, contains a broad range of long-term
goals and near-term objectives, with performance measures. It is not being
implemented.
Responsible internal management practice and transparency of a government
agency’s performance are not the sort of issues that generally get
the public out en masse with burning torches. Yet in this wealthy,
highly participatory city, surrounded by prestigious graduate management
schools and in the center of the digital revolution, it has taken "outside
agitation" to push even the tiniest beginning of municipal administrative
reform. This is very odd.
For an organizational structure as unwieldy as that of San Francisco’s
to have persisted, indeed to have been continually augmented, there must
be some advantage in it to someone. Several things spring to one’s
attention with even a cursory glance at the organization chart.
The most striking thing about the chart, usually printed in a compressed
layout that veils its true structure, is the remarkable multitude of top-level
city agencies. 37 independent departments and commissions are on the right
branch immediately reporting to the mayor, five more report to the mayor
nominally through the City Administrator, and 13, on the left branch of
the chart, are in the mayor’s office itself, making a total of 55
essentially autonomous agencies. The 37 on the department branch all (except
the Zoo) have governing commissions, the members of which are appointed
by the mayor. Most of these commission appointments, in this and most
administrations, are the mayor’s supporters and representatives of
supporting interest groups. San Francisco’s city structure may not
work from an operational standpoint, but from the point of view of this
political benefit, it is terrific.
The left branch holds a striking number of operating agencies—often
with responsibilities that overlap those of various departments—in
the mayor’s office itself. Policy-level staff in these agencies serve
at the mayor’s pleasure, outside the civil service system. These
can be, and often are, places to put more supporters and sons and daughters
of supporters, regardless of professional skills. The Redevelopment Agency,
the Port Authority, the Treasure Island Development Authority and the
Housing Authority (highlighted with a dashed-line box on the chart), governed
by commissions appointed by the mayor, similarly have flexible hiring
potential outside the city’s civil service system. They are not city
agencies, but instead are federal or state agencies, over the day-to-day
operations of which the mayor’s office has considerable control.
All these agencies represent opportunities for patronage placements, and
that has been San Francisco’s longstanding practice. In addition,
spots in these federal and state agencies have often served as consolation
prizes for staff people who for one reason or another needed to be moved
from positions at City Hall. Rarely would this reason have been superb
performance. The effect of this practice on the performance of these agencies
over the years has been the subject of widespread dismay to insiders and
occasional press reports. However, nothing is ever done about it.
A unique feature of the current administration has been the expansion
of patronage staff appointments to the departments themselves, long the
nearly exclusive purview of the civil service system. With the five-fold
increase in the number of special assistants—a senior level position
outside civil service—since the Jordan administration, the opportunity
for patronage has increased greatly. In particular, the Solid Waste Management
Program and the Airport, with its enormous public works construction activity,
have seen numbers of staff people whose professional qualifications are
not immediately obvious. Additionally, a surprising number of the department
heads appointed in the current administration have little or no previous
management experience in the area for which they have been given executive
responsibility. Some of them are rarely seen in the office.
The result is that along with many well-qualified, dedicated civil
servants, San Francisco employs a large number of people, particularly
in more senior positions, who are simply not sufficiently skilled, experienced
or motivated to pursue improved government performance. They report to
commissioners who usually have little background in the function of the
agency for which they have ultimate policy authority. And no one ever
asks them to make these measurable performance improvements, anyway.
With this understanding, San Francisco’s failure to pursue management
reform; its inadequate human resources support; its limited, scattershot
approach to providing public information and responding to the concerns
of the public; its lack of innovation and transparency in handling contracts
and purchasing; and its failure to implement local sustainable development
planning become less surprising.
San Francisco clearly has reached a point at which it must embrace
fundamental government reform if it is even to begin the difficult task
of bringing its management systems into the modern era. The responsibility
for managing government operations rests solely with the office of the
mayor. However, experience has shown this administration to be highly
unlikely to embrace a reform agenda. On the contrary, it has led the city
in precisely the wrong direction.
Given these circumstances, reform must come from a public fed up
with the way things are now, from the Board of Supervisors and the ballot.
Other cities have faced and solved similar problems. Following is a seven-point
agenda that will get the wheels turning toward accountable, responsive
government.
- Renew and Codify Government’s Commitment to Ethical Standards:
The City Charter already sets out prohibitions against appointments
to the public service as a reward for political activity and for friends
and family. However, longstanding practice has taken the edge of this
prohibition and fostered an attitude of "this is the way it’s always
been done." It is time that appointing officers make an explicit pledge
that they will neither perpetuate nor tolerate this practice. More generally,
among employees in many agencies there is not always a shared definition
of what constitutes ethical behavior within government service. The
Board should pass an ordinance requiring every agency, including itself
and the Mayor’s office, to discuss, adopt, and make an ongoing
commitment to an appropriate code of ethics, such as those of numerous
professional societies or the standards for ethical conduct for employees
of the federal executive branch, and to ensure that all staff are cognizant
of the contents and agree to operate by the guidelines.
Such guidelines would make it clear, for instance, that it is inappropriate
for building inspectors to have sideline work as real estate investors,
that Supervisors should not carry legislation assisting an industry in
which they are employed or vote on a permit appeal where a spouse stands
to make a profit, and that city employees have an obligation to report
misuse of public resources that come to their attention.
The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions has collected over
850 codes of ethics for various fields. Implementation might be monitored
by the Ethics Commission, with ongoing reporting to the public.
- Create a Commitment to Efficient, Public-Service-Oriented,
Accountable City Management: San Francisco has made no realistic
commitment to establishing sound government management practice that
provides the best service to the public for the least cost to the taxpayers,
while fairly considering the needs of people employed in government
service. This may be because existing patronage relationships are threatened
by this level of accountability. It may be due to simple lack of leadership
and institutional resistance to change. Whatever the reason it has not
happened in the past, the public should insist upon it now. An efficient,
well-managed government is key to being able to get the most public
service the local economy can afford. An investment in resources in
public management will pay off many-fold in the future.
The Board should create a policy that it expects to receive regular
performance measurement information from all city agencies, and that
this information will be shared with the public in an accessible manner
on the Worldwide web.
Government should create an integrated management function within
the mayor’s office to guide management practice in all city agencies.
If the mayor will not create such a office, the Board of Supervisors should
propose a charter amendment to create one.
Such a body, staffed by professional civil servants working with consulting
services as necessary, should study the best practices of other jurisdictions
and put structures in place for citywide performance data collection,
analysis and strategic planning. It should be held specifically accountable
to 1) reform management practice; 2) analyze and negotiate civil service
and human resources reform; 3) assist in establishing best practice in
procurement and contracting; and 4) minimize the environmental impact
of all government operations. The office should also make recommendations
for consolidation of city functions into an organizational structure that
might be able to function effectively.
Cities throughout the world work toward the international set of
management quality standards called ISO9000 and ISO14000. San Francisco
should join San Jose, Seattle, and many other well-managed cities in using
this well-respected management systems framework.
For public accountability, dissemination of public information and ease
of use of public services, the mayor, or if necessary, the Board, should
quickly increase the use of information technology and e-government
by expanding and directly funding the Department of Telecommunications
to handle this activity citywide. Now scores of individual agencies are
left to their own devices, with the inevitable highly varying results.
Instead of providing useful information to the public, many department
web-sites contain little more than the agency’s mission statement.
A multilingual city with multilingual visitors as its major industry should
not have a web site only in English. Most routine public transactions
should be able to be done on-line. The voting records of members of the
Board of Supervisors should be readily accessible and easy to analyze.
The public should be able to find an agency’s budget, its record
of performance and plans for improvement, and a summarized log of citizen
complaints and how those complaints have been handled.
- Revive the City’s Commitment to a Professional
Civil Service: The expansion of the special assistant category and
the placement of inexperienced people in department-head positions drains
resources from legitimate government activity, demoralizes competent
staff, undercuts the ability of city agencies to manage their own programs,
and sours the public’s perception of government. Legislation should
vastly reduce the use of the special assistant job category to the few
special occasions for which it was originally designed. The job qualifications
and performance of incumbents in this category should be closely scrutinized,
and appropriate staffing adjustments made. The mayor’s office should
remove itself from the business of running operating programs with non-civil-service
staff and combine these functions with the appropriate existing city
departments, focusing its attention on "steering" instead of "rowing."
The public, the Board, and the editorial boards of the media should make
clear to this and future mayors that they expect experienced professionals
in department leadership positions, and apply the pressure of public opinion
against the appointment of people who would be learning on the job. The
Board of Supervisors has had a bad record of approving high-level staff
and commission nominations of professionally under-qualified individuals
for political reasons. It should stand up for the long-term public interest
and decline to continue this practice.
Imperative to a revived commitment to civil service, as well as to
achieving management excellence, is civil service reform and improvement
of the human resources function. The Board must insist that this critical
function be improved, and done so as quickly as possible. The Department
of Human Resources should work with the Civil Service Commission, the
mayor’s office, and worker’s representatives to do a citywide
survey of program managers and rank and file staff people to identify
areas in which the system is not meeting their needs. A strategy must
be created to meet these needs, with progress toward implementation reported
to the Board. In addition to other goals identified in the survey, the
strategy should include reduction of the time it takes to fill vacant
positions with well-qualified applicants; overhaul of the compensation
system to provide flexibility for effective recruitment and retention;
bringing the civil service testing schedules and content up to current
needs; changes to the classification system to update class descriptions,
reduce the number of classes, provide more flexibility for cross-training,
and allow for the introduction of new job types without resorting to the
use of the special assistant category; advancing performance-based government
through individual employee performance plans and incentives; and investing
in training and professional development of the city workforce. These
are all areas in which San Francisco’s human resources support services
need work.
- Establish a Formal Complaints System Run by an Elected Public Advocate:
The public deserves responsiveness from local government, but it is
not getting it. Government needs information from the public as to whether
its services satisfy public needs, but it often acts as if it does not
care. Complaints now often are handled by city agencies putting the
complainant in an adversarial role with the program manager or employee
complained of, with the responsible agency taking on the role of some
sort of neutral arbitrator. This represents an abdication of the city’s
overall responsibility for the satisfaction of members of the public
with its services. No one keeps a central log of complaints and their
disposition with which to improve staff training and as an early warning
sign of structural problems, such as a lack of code enforcement.
As a representative body independent of the executive branch and a central
focus for people’s contact with the city, the Board of Supervisors
should house this office of complaints, managed by an elected Public Advocate
such as that in New York City. The Advocate serves as an ombudsman, or
go-between, for the consumer of city services. He or she investigates
and answers complaints about government, proposes new solutions to make
service to the public more efficient, and helps people gain access to
government agencies. The Public Advocate is responsible for reporting
the failure of any city agency or official to comply with the city charter.
The Advocate also monitors the effectiveness of city’s public information
and education efforts.
A good complaints system will ensure that problems are resolved quickly
as near to the source as possible and that there is a clear procedure
for complaints that remain unresolved. It will entail a central place
for complainants, or those acting on their behalf, to lodge their complaints;
a procedure for investigation, including a means to have the investigation
done by people outside the department complained of, if necessary; a means
of keeping the complainant informed on progress and outcome; a means of
redress for valid complaints; and a feedback mechanism for departments
and elected officials so the results may be used in program reassessment.
The identity of the complainant should be kept confidential throughout
the process.
Creating a new elected official will require a charter amendment, but
the Board could start getting the program in place by ordinance first.
- Protect the Confidentiality of Staff Reports to Investigators:
Not only should government be responsive to the concerns of the public,
but city staff people should have a safe conduit for reporting observations
of shortcomings in government operations. While San Francisco needs
new internal auditing functions, it does already have a number of agencies
that more or less frequently investigate as part of their ongoing activities:
the Controller, the City and District Attorneys, the Board’s Budget
Analyst, the Civil Service and Ethics Commissions and the Civil Grand
Jury. Immediately, a city ordinance should insure that the identity
of any employee source and the confidentiality of the information provided,
if it would compromise the source, will be protected scrupulously, which
is not required now. There is whistle-blower protection, but by the
time an employee has been discriminated against, damage to his or her
career has already been done. This lack of confidentiality (and the
widespread perception that current investigative agencies are not completely
independent) has created a tremendous disincentive for city staff people
to come forward with information on problems within their agencies.
- Create an Independent Public Auditor: There are many disadvantages
to having organized political parties vying for public power, but one
advantage that "nonpartisan" San Francisco lacks is partisan scrutiny
of its government operations. In this situation, it is essential to
have a robust internal audit function. An Independent Public Auditor
looks for waste, fraud, and the abuse of public trust. It has a staff
of investigators who not only look for the kind of malfeasance that
might be referred for prosecution, but for examples of undue access
to government resources and services by favored groups, such as instances
of political pressure applied to purchasing and contracting decisions
and to subsequent performance evaluation, agencies giving preferred
treatment to private "expediters," private individuals participating
in the hiring process for city staff, or "friends" committees which
allow interests with a financial stake in agency decisions to make financial
contributions to the agency’s operating budget. There are numerous
examples of public auditing agencies around the world, often called
auditors general; in the military, inspectors general; or at the US
federal level, the General Accounting Office.
The Auditor General’s work would not replace the fiscal and
performance audits now done by the Controller and the Budget Analyst.
In fact, those audits should be expanded to ensure that all city agencies
receive performance audits regularly. The Public Auditor would focus on
areas that are known to be readily susceptible to corruption: procurement,
revenue collection, law enforcement, licensing and permitting, the provision
of services where there is a government monopoly (such as subsidized housing),
construction permitting and land zoning, and government appointments.
It looks for wrongdoing and the appearance of wrongdoing, which undercuts
the public’s faith in government.
The key factors in a successful independent audit function are independence
within the government structure, professionalism of staff, accountability
of the audit function itself, and resources with which to operate. For
independence from the executive branch, where most of the activity to
be audited is located, the Auditor should report to the legislative branch,
which in San Francisco is the Board of Supervisors. Having the internal
auditor under the legislature is the common practice: for instance, the
federal General Accounting Office reports to Congress, not to the President.
The Independent Public Auditor would work closely with the Board’s
budget analyst, who is an outside contractor. The agency’s work would
be in addition to, not in replacement of, the fiscal and performance audits
now conducted by the Controller and by the Budget Analyst at the request
of the Board of Supervisors.
For independence from the politics of the legislature, the Auditor should
be hired by and report to a joint legislative audit and review committee
of respected community leaders, chosen by the full Board, not by supervisors
individually. The Auditor should set his or her own audit agenda, be free
to follow up on any reports received by the office, and have a high level
of access to information. Referrals for prosecution should be given high
priority by the District Attorney. Results of audits and recommendations
for reform should be made easily accessible to the public, and the Controller
should set up a system for following up on implementation of the Auditor’s
recommendations.
It is essential that the Auditor be a highly qualified professional of
scrupulous integrity, experienced in this type of auditing, with few or
no ties to the local power structure (Benjamin Franklin recruited the
nation’s first successful inspector general from Paris). For freedom
from intimidation, like the Controller the Auditor should have a long
term of office. The salary should be commensurate with that of a Superior
Court Judge.
The Public Auditor’s office should itself be audited regularly by
a independent public accountancy firm.
As has been mentioned, San Francisco does already have several investigative
bodies, which either lack the complete independence from the executive
branch necessary for an independent auditor, or are outside City/County
government like the Civil Grand Jury. What they all lack is the
budget to provide anything like serious ongoing oversight. Indeed, the
Civil Grand Jury is essentially a volunteer organization. The Civil Service
Commission has no staff of its own and the Ethics Commission has only
one investigator. Creating these watchdog agencies but not funding them
is worse than having none at all, since their existence deludes the public
into thinking there is review of government activities. A public auditing
function must be funded at a level commensurate with effective similar
agencies elsewhere, with sufficient professional staff, or it will be
another empty exercise. Its funding must be secured from potential retaliation
as a result of the legitimate exercise of its mandate.
- Better Balance the Branches of Government: One reason for the
growing excesses of San Francisco’s executive branch that its power
isn’t balanced by an assertive legislature. Leaving aside the unusual
recent situation in which the mayor was able to appoint so many of its
members, the Board of Supervisors needs better resources to be able
to represent the public interest. Two aides per Supervisor are not enough
to handle ongoing committee work, constituent services and daily administration,
and to leave any time for good policy development, responsible participation
in regional government or the establishment of new district-based institutions.
Handicapping public representatives only handicaps public service. The
voters should rethink their opposition to staffing levels for Supervisors,
putting effective service to themselves at a higher value than consistency
with an ill-advised public commitment to cut staff.
It isn’t good practice to have elected officials employed in areas
outside of government; it creates too much of a potential conflict of
interest. Inadequate compensation for people who have control of public
benefits creates a fertile field for payoff attempts from people who want
things from government. Yet San Francisco voters pay Supervisors in one
of the most expensive cities in the world—only London and Hong Kong
are more costly—about $37,000 a year. No one familiar with the Supervisors’
work load could suggest that this is a part-time job. While the current
salary is not much different from the city’s overall average, at
least as of the mid-1990’s, it is very low for professionals, who
in order to support their living expenses generally either need a private
income or part-time work while serving on the Board. Or they serve at
considerable financial loss. It has been fashionable for years to jeer
at the Board, but at that salary, the voters are narrowing greatly the
pool of people who are able to run for office. Out of a $4+ billion budget,
this false economy achieves nothing but the humiliation of the people
elected to represent the public interest, whose office staff make significantly
more than they do.
The salary of Supervisors should be similar to levels of compensation
of other county elected representatives in California, and automatically
adjusted on a regular basis.
Like the mayor, Supervisors should not be allowed to hold outside jobs.
These changes will require a modification of the Charter.
Where the Money Comes From: An expensive set of proposals?
It has been reliably estimated that the overhead for people who are not
qualified for the jobs, and not performing the work, in the small Solid
Waste Management Program alone comes to something close to half a million
dollars a year. There are well over 500 special assistants on the government
payroll, most of them highly paid. Public money that could be spent on
management and accountability is being spent elsewhere, and not in a way
that serves the public. In addition, every audit done by the budget analyst
has resulted in net savings to the city that have exceeded the cost of
the audit. A big reason the private sector embraces modern management
techniques and internal controls is that it doesn’t have the financial
luxury not to do so.
Change is Possible: San Francisco needs fundamental reform,
and while the challenge is significant, this is no time to give way to
cynicism and despair. The Republicans may have won in Washington, but
San Franciscans still want to have a government that works for all members
of society, and is accountable to them, not to special interests. The
united people of Czechoslovakia made a velvet revolution that toppled
an entrenched dictatorship without firing a shot. The united voters of
San Francisco have brought in a reform legislature, which can make some
real changes in the way the city works if it will grasp the opportunity.
Beryl Magilavy has been an environmental advocate in San Francisco since
1987. She ran a nonprofit recycling center under city contract and as president
of the nonprofit organization, Sustainable City, has collaborated extensively
with numerous city agencies while creating the city’s sustainability
plan. She served as the first director of the city’s Department of
the Environment in 1997-98 and has been active in local politics since that
time. Her discussions with many people connected with local government and
her own observations have led her to believe that San Francisco cannot become
a sustainable city without fundamental government reform.
None of the examples of bad practice in this essay are hypothetical.
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