What's a Good Measure of Government Results?

I've been disappointed at both the state Progress Board and even more the Portland/Multnomah Progress Board - both seem to have a strong position from which to push for government accountability and an increase in bang for the taxpayer buck, but both seem to have little taste for really driving that process.

I attribute that to the origin of both bodies. Both were born of the late 80s/early 90s desire to avoid the painful economic downturn Oregon had just gone through with the implosion of the wood products industry. The ruling class decided that a Strategic Plan (and better yet, a Strategic Planning Process) would save them, and the state Progress Board was made the keeper of that flame. That credulous view of Strategic Planning haunts both organizations, and keeps them mired in otherworldly abstraction.

Compared to what, you ask? If I were running things, here's what I'd have the state Progress Board do - some of which they are already doing; some they want to do; some they don't yet realize they should do:

1. Use consistent terminology that is both accessible to the public and precisely defined - i.e. say "measures" not "benchmarks" when the rest of the world says "measures"
   
2. Use common and accessible units of measure for outputs (or better yet outcomes) - i.e. dollars per student-hour of classroom instruction
   
3. Relentlessly purge measures of activity; replace with measures of outputs
4. Market the measures to the public, and spend at least as much time talking with consumers of services as with providers when defining measures
   
5. Make frequent apples-to-apples comparisons to other states, other providers, and the private sector
6. Create and maintan a wall between the hard numbers and the fuzzy strategic planning happy-talk
7. Distinguish between measures, estimates, and goals
8. Require agencies to report using "blessed" units of measure, or charge them for the conversion
9. Don't be afraid of an occasionally adversarial interaction with an agency
   

I wonder how many of these will be covered at the Oregon Public Performance Measurement Association's inaugural meeting next week?

Pdx in the Ascendant? Really?

In response to a posting here claiming that Portland is highly ranked on countless lists and is thus a wonderful place with little need for improvement, I wrote the following:

I recommend you read the classic book "How to Lie with Statistics" before you burst any buttons from chest-swelling pride. Many of the rankings you report are from organizations I have no reason to trust; others are directly contradicted by other established facts; still others are going to be determined by the unstated assumptions of the rankers.

To take a few: the Pearl District is also an example of taxpayer giveaways that subsidize rich yuppies. If the "Project for Public Spaces" is part of the lemming-like New Urbanist Movement, then of course they'll rate the Pearl highly - those are two aspects of the same religion.

And if Portland is the most child-friendly city, why is it also a city with few children, and that number plummeting?

As for the Tax Foundation, my initial look at their ranking system indicates they excludes fees - but Oregon rakes in $2 in fees for ever $1 in personal income tax revenue. I don't think the Tax Foundation's scoring system takes into account how distorted Oregon's fee-heavy revenue system is - and calling us "low tax" by ignoring 2/3rds of the state's take is dishonest to say the least.

But hey, how does Oregon rank on self-delusion among liberal cheerleaders? (Not you specifically, Chris - this is a common theme I've seen.) That's one ranking I'm sure we earned honestly.

Foundations and Gov't Accountability

I will be the first person to tell you how cynical I am regarding liberal foundations and their potentially pernicious effects on civic life. Certainly, the news about how a handful of liberal foundations managed to foist "campaign-finance reform" on an unsuspecting and unwilling public has only sharpened my suspicions.

Now, it looks like I will be -- in some small way -- the beneficiary of liberal foundation dollars. I am a confirmed attendee of the Oregon Public Performance Measurement Association's inaugural meeting.

Apparently, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is paying for the meeting. I hope that means nice sandwiches.

Come to find out, the Sloan Foundation has an entire program dedicated to increasing and improving the measurement of municipal government results. Where oh where have they been all my life? And can I trust them?

At least I'll get fed.

Egypt gets what the Democrats don't

From the 27-May-2005 Wall Street Journal:

Egyptian Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali could have been describing Argentina when he told us that under the traditional state system, "Government is a predator and the citizen is the prey. You pounce on him and you squeeze him all you can." Egypt wants to break with that tradition so as to attract capital and boost economic activity. Speaking like a Reagan supply-sider, Mr. Boutros-Ghali offered that any revenue loss under his tax plan to cut rates and provide an amnesty would be offset by higher growth and more taxpayers coming into the formal economy.

How well this describes Oregon's view of its taxpayers.

Daily 5

There are some remarkably good resources for managers on the web (as well as the expected crop of Dilbert-like crud).

The latest (for me) is something simple called the Daily Five Minutes. I like it.

What is Privacy?

Leave it to Bruce Schneier to send me this link to a definitive taxonomy of the concept of Privacy.

Brilliant.

Why I Love to Hate the OCPP

Before I thrash him here, I should say that I actually like Chuck Sheketoff. He's an excellent public speaker, which I like and admire. He's witty and thinks quickly on his feet. I recommended him to be part of a City Club of Portland panel, and he did very well. Sit next to him at dinner and you'll have a fine time.

But Chuck's political writing gets under my skin because his approach is inductive and emotional, and he uses that approach to gloss over otherwise troublesome facts. If you're looking to have your liberal prejudices reaffirmed, he's great. If you're looking to understand what's going on in detail, he's worse than useless.

Consider his recent [when I first wrote this] column regarding an apparently huge piece of corporate welfare, "Is Intel Bluffing?" - it's a masterpiece of the genre.

The public policy question is, should Intel get a huge property tax break on a planned multi-billion dollar investment? Useful related questions are, what will happen if they don't get the tax break, and what's the purpose of property taxes and of selective tax breaks? Is the (fairly common) practice of excusing very large capital investments from taxation a nod to the virtues of the Land Value Tax?

Sheketoff sidesteps all of that. To him, all taxes are just and good. There are no opportunity costs, and the hypothetical tax revenue is as good as in the bank - so the tax break "give[s] away $579 million of property taxes that are dedicated to funding public services."

Except of course it doesn't "give away" what it hasn't collected yet, and the whole question is, will Intel make a huge multi-billion dollar investment in Oregon if Oregon is planning to tax that investment to the tune of half a billion dollars? More pointedly, what are Intel's other options, and how likely is it that another location (Arizona, for example) might waive the tax if Oregon doesn't, and thus get the investment?

I think the whole subject of local governments competing with tax breaks and giveaways to lure jobs is fascinating. I'm convinced most of it is stupid; it's often a zero-sum game where tax dollars get spent to shuffle existing jobs between cities and states, and the firms that aren't threatening to move find that their taxes are being used to subsidize their competitors.

Here too, Sheketoff can't give us any facts, just innuendo mixed with irrelevant statistics.

[Postscript - Sheketoff won by getting the tax break killed, and Intel did NOT invest in Oregon. Perhaps that was his goal all along - to chase away those pesky jobs that make people independent of their government, and keep as many people unemployed and downtrodden as possible.]