Big Government Databases

The next time someone tells you the answer to some pressing social problem is a massive new government database, read this first - an audit of Australia's main social-service database.

Even more cautionary is this information about Canada's failed gun registry database. Or this one. Or this web site.

Private databases often do poorly as well - see the opening paragraph here. The difference is, when the private firm screws up, they can't tax you - at worst they go out of business and someone smarter takes their place.

Chalkboard's "Open Book$ Project" Slouches Towards Irrelevance

I actually had some hope that the Chalkboard Project would offer up something useful. I was particularly hoping that their "Open Book$ Project" would be good -- it promised to clarify just where all the money goes in K-12 education, educating us through one of my favorite things in public policy, "transparent budgeting."

The term "transparency" has vanished, as has my hope that the Open Book$ Project would be useful -- or that it would be anything other than another exercise in defending the status quo by hiding the relevant facts.

How can you tell that the Open Book$ Project is another union-driven scam? Two items: personnel and approach.

Personnel - the Open Book$ Project is being run by my friend and sometime sparring partner Steve Novick, a mere tool of the unions and big government. Steve excels at cherry-picking his facts to support his preconceived results.

Approach - the Open Book$ Project isn't using Activity Based Costing. For example, look at the accounting for buildings. Rather than allocate buildings to their functions -- i.e. the cost of an administration building should be grouped with other administration expenses -- Steve and friends have a "Buildings" category separate from both administration and actual instruction.

What does that mean? It means that when Portland Public Schools have 16 more schools open than the number of students would support, and a Taj Mahal administrative palace, all sucking scarce dollars away from the schools' instructional mission, you can't tell it from Steve's chosen method of organizing and presenting the data.

Instead, the great goal of the Open Book$ Project is now to be "snazzy." Not scrupulously accurate, not fastidiously clear, not painfully precise, and clearly not transparent.

So Steve Novick is using the Chalkboard Project to give what voters and taxpayers and parents do not need -- more smoke and mirrors.

Budnick is Just All Right with Me

He isn't Jesus, but the Trib's Nick Budnick is actually a very good journalist, and my prior post on the Metro Auditor article didn't reflect my belief that he is. After blogging my rant last Saturday after reading his article, I called him to ask, in essence, who it was that sold him the story.

I was surprised when he said nobody did. But I believe him.

This isn't to imply that, had there been an instigator or a source, that it would have invalidated the story in any way. As the Trib's Jim Redden puts it, in politics there are no virgin births. Had there been a midwife, shall we say, to this story - someone pushing Nick to write it - then the questions are the same: is the story accurate, fair, and newsworthy.

Having spoken now to Nick about it, I'm inclined to believe that he gave Alexis Dow the benefit of the doubt in several areas where he didn't have to, and that he erred on the side of caution. I revise my earlier assessment - not yellow journalism, but perhaps a pale cream color, or a very light blonde.

So where does this leave Dow? In brief, not looking too good. She's got a challenger with apparently roughly equal credentials, and a burst of bad press to overcome. Her next steps should probably be:

1. To the extent she's actually done anything wrong, naughty, or less than good, 'fess up and get it over with. Voters love a repentance.

2. To the extent there's anything to fix, launch a fix-it campaign. If you can't tell the voters that everything's all better, then tell them it's on the way to getting better, and here is your plan. Documenting her actual work hours would be good. (I still think it's irrelevant to a salaried person who is performing well, but public perception will say otherwise.)

3. Hire someone (on her own dime) to perform a 360-degree review of her, interviewing her staff and peers and providing her with a warts-and-all assessment of her performance and image inside Metro. Without that information, it'll be hard to move forward.

4. Hire (on her own dime) a good PR professional and get on the right side of the media. She's got to earn the trust of reporters, and a pro can help her do that by guiding her steps at this crucial time.

Metro needs a very strong auditor, and Dow has proven she is one. I'd hate to roll the dice on whether her challenger is as good.

AP done write English good

Normally the Associated Press (AP) Wire represents the best of professional workday journalism. Occasionally the AP Wire will emit something that does not do justice to the English language.

Such as this piece.

He "is doing very well, better than can be expected considering the bullet wounds," said hospital CEO Vic Fresolone. He said surgeons had repaired intestinal damage caused by the most serious of the wounds.
[...]
A nearby elementary school in Roseburg, a former southwest Oregon timber town of about 21,000 residents, was briefly locked down as a precaution.

First, the intestinal damage was not "caused by ... the wounds" - the intestinal damage IS a wound, caused in this case by one or more bullets.

And Roseburg is "a former southwest Oregon timber town"? What, did they move it to Arizona for better weather?

Metro's Cabal Finds Their Patsy

I predicted earlier that the hit piece on Metro Auditor Alexis Dow was timed and organized to support a rival bid. (Speaking of timing - the story broke just as Dow was going on a long-planned vacation. Makes it hard to fight back, doesn't it?)

Lo and behold, not three days later comes this announcement: Multnomah County Auditor Suzanne Flynn spontaneously decides to challenge Dow.

Did it just now occur to Flynn that she herself is term limited out of her current position? I somehow doubt that.

As for why one might see Flynn as a patsy... we know Metro is a haunt of Smart Growth religious extremists. Turns out Flynn has a master's degree in Urban Planning.

How that helps an auditor is a mystery - but it explains her passion for joining the High Church of Planning and Smart Growth. She's already a true believer too.

That could be bad news for Metro as an organization. If everyone's a true believer and nobody's a skeptic, it's easy to fall into Groupthink and make enormous mistakes. It's also a reason to question Flynn's ability to audit objectively. If she's a true-blue believer in the holy mission, will she ask the tough questions that Dow has asked?

Color me skeptical of Flynn's fitness for this position, and doubly skeptical of someone who'd be a party to the dishonest smear attack on Dow.

Better Management - Goverment Style (Fort Wayne, Indiana)

When I encounter skepticism that government can be made more efficient, I like to respond with examples like this. Emphasis added by me.

Fixing potholes and processes
Fort Wayne, Indiana, is one of the first major U.S. cities to roll out Six Sigma. Mayor Graham Richard, elected to the position in 1999, had long been familiar with quality improvement. In 1991, while serving as a state senator, Richard helped start the TQM Network, a group of small to midsized companies that used benchmarks to improve their processes. Most of these companies were suppliers to General Electric, a company that famously enjoyed success with Six Sigma. GE’s suppliers in the TQM Network took note, and many of them implemented Six Sigma programs of their own, Richard says. When he became mayor, those successes were still fresh in his mind.

[...]
The city’s first Six Sigma projects, permitting and pothole repair, were chosen for this reason because they were high profile and would provide noticeable results for Fort Wayne’s 250,000 residents. Both were problem areas: Before Six Sigma, it took an average of 50 days to get a city building permit, and it took up to four days for city workers to fill the many dangerous potholes that form on the city’s roads. Of course, before Six Sigma no one in the city’s offices knew these statistics, as no one had ever collectively examined them.

Richard’s goal was to get potholes fixed within 24 hours of their reporting. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” Richard remembers. “Everyone said, ‘You’ll never make it.’” Black Belts mapped the locations of potholes, finding the areas of the city where they happened most often and concentrated their efforts there. Today, most potholes are fixed within four hours after they’re reported.

In addition, Black Belts used flowcharts and maps to highlight redundancies in the city’s permitting system and slashed the amount of time it takes to issue a permit from 50 days to just 11 or 12.

The trick, Richard says, is for public agencies to institutionalize the notion that they are service providers, not bureaucrats.

“When you remember that fact, you’re telling people that you’re there to provide a service, just as anyone in the public sector would,” he says. “People don’t think of government as a business, but they should. We’re one of the biggest service organizations in the area.”

The often-substantial cost of Six Sigma training can be a deterrent to its successful implementation--especially for smaller companies and governments--but Richard found an innovative way to provide it. He used his connections with the TQM Network to have experienced Black Belts provide training, and then reached a deal with Six Sigma giants Raytheon and ITT to allow city workers to attend internal Six Sigma training sessions. A TQM Network Master Black Belt, Roger Hirt, served as a mentor to Fort Wayne’s fledging Six Sigma practitioners, and also offered Green Belt training.

Richard estimates that the training could have cost the city $50,000 per Black Belt, but it totaled less than a tenth of that sum.

In just five years, Six Sigma has revolutionized Fort Wayne’s city government. City workers have completed 60 Six Sigma projects, which have saved upward of $10 million, and there are now 35 Six Sigma belts on the staff. Fort Wayne’s school district is now implementing Six Sigma, and the city gets monthly requests for information from other public administrators interested in modeling Fort Wayne’s success in their own cities.

Fort Wayne’s Six Sigma-facilitated improvements include:

Variation elimination and bottleneck reduction, allowing the fire department inspectors to perform 23 percent more reinspections annually, without any staff increases.

Parks department workers, led by a Six Sigma Black Belt, designed an experiment to determine if city trees were trimmed at the right frequencies, reducing complaint calls from citizens by 33 percent.

Improved accounting in the transportation engineering department freed $150,000 that had previously been tied up due to inaccurate estimations of project costs.

On-the-job injuries have plummeted to one of the lowest rates in the country.

Pdx Trib Assassinates Alexis Dow

In a remarkable piece of yellow journalism, the Portland Tribune decides to take a little-deserved -- and highly one-sided -- whack at what looks like one of the better success stories of Metro, Auditor Alexis Dow.

The real reason, I believe, someone sold the Trib on a political hit-piece just before election season, was to pave the way for a new "reform" candidate who will be a patsy for the folks who don't like Dow's honesty and hard work.

I've never met Ms. Dow. But thanks to this pseudo-scandal story, I can be pretty confident she's good people. Good auditors are seldom popular, and Dow has won four "major government auditing awards" and is described by other auditors as courageous.

No wonder someone's out to get her.

Let's review the charges, and look at how author Nick Budnick uses innuendo to suggest what his facts don't support.

First, a seemingly rhetorical question that Budnick should have actually addressed, but doesn't. It's the headline: Who audits the auditor? It's a fine question -- but it actually has an answer, and the answer undercuts Budnick's thesis that Dow is out of control.

In any organization with an auditor, including the City of Portland which like Metro has a directly elected auditor, there's a budget for the audit department. It's set and approved by someone other than the auditor -- by a chief operating officer, or a chief executive, or a board of directors. Auditors don't get to raise their own revenue. So whoever pays for that function is supposed to exercise normal budgetary controls, including reviewing whether the money is spent within the rules. Dow may be directly elected, but that doesn't place her department budget beyond review.

Budnick could tell readers that, but it would undercut his "Auditors gone wild!" schtick. (Indeed, we learn further down that every one of Dow's expenses "had to be approved by Metro's finance unit" -- but that inconvenient fact is not introduced until the tail end of paragraph 8 on page 8, long after the false thesis has been established.)

The front-page, above-the-fold story opens with a list of overstated charges, each with no more than a grain of truth, each of which Budnick will later undercut or refute himself:

1. Although the Metro Charter prohibits Dow from outside employment, she earns $35,000 to $50,000 a year for serving on the Longview Fibre Co. board of directors and two subcommittees, which meet regularly.

2. Dow appears to be working significantly fewer than the 40 hours a week Metro pays her for.

3. Although Dow has three staff auditors in her office, she has repeatedly hired outside firms both to perform auditing work and to help with presentations.

4. Dow travels extensively and pays lavishly for trips only remotely related to Metro, while spending Metro funds on meals, parking and gifts for departing employees.

By playing these early on the front page and burying the details on page 8, Budnick and the Trib gin up their "scandal" - until you turn the page and discover the bait-and-switch nature of the reporting.

Dow is forbidden to have "outside employment" - except her Board of Directors position is not considered by anybody to be "employment" in any legal sense. And Dow didn't just assume it - she confirmed it with the Oregon Attorney General's Office before she first ran. That would seem to be the mark of a careful person who wants to do the right thing.

Budnick's article can only include a sniffy quote from Jewel Lansing about Dow's compensation: “I don’t think it’s illegal for her — but I think it ought to be illegal.”

Oh. So Dow carefully stays within the law, and that means we should criticize her for -- what, exactly? Failing to obey laws that don't exist?

It gets better.

Dow is supposedly working "fewer than the 40 hours a week Metro pays her for." But Dow isn't paid to work 40 hours a week. Dow is salaried. Salaried workers don't get paid by the hour, and can work more or fewer than 40 hours as they like, so long as they accomplish their jobs.

And the evidence is that Dow actually works more than 40 hours a week anyway. Budnick never tries to question this, accepting (as I do) Dow's contention that she works nights and weekends.

Then Budnick changes the denominator. After talking about working 40 hours a week, he rattles off how many hours Dow might or might not have worked on other tasks ... per month.

Here's a key passage:

Dow cautioned that her calendar is only a “planning tool.” But if she fulfilled her plans, she spent 24 work hours on FEI and Longview business in January 2005; 16 hours in March; 41 hours, including time on OHSU, in May; and 37 hours in September.

So, the worst Budnick can find is an average of less than 10 hours a week of non-Metro meetings, and that's what's scheduled. I looked at my own calendar, and I've got at least that much on my calendar too. But I know that I put those there so that I'll know what meetings I might go to (and to prevent double or triple booking myself), not all of which I must go to.

Budnick never attempts to find out how much time Dow really spends at Metro or how many of the outside meetings she really attends, preferring to rely on second-hand innuendo from two admittedly disgruntled former employees:

...[T]wo former staff auditors, Joe Gibbons and Jim McMullin, said that from their observations, Dow spent no more than half her time on Metro business.

...McMullin [...] worked for Dow for more than five years before quitting in frustration.

...Gibbons [...] said he worked for Dow for seven years before quitting in disgust.

I have to wonder how these two tie in to an earlier passage:

With no experience in government auditing, Dow hired top-notch staff, often veterans of the federal General Accounting Office. With their help, she has won four major government auditing awards.

It's hard to imagine Budnick would have omitted telling us if McMullin or Gibbons were part of that "top-notch staff" or were "veterans of the federal General Accounting Office" - more likely, I would guess, they were slacker hangers-on from before Dow arrived, who couldn't cut it under a hard charging and highly effective boss.

The rest of the article withers away under the light of this one sentence:

The Metro expenses she’s racked up on meals, travel and contracting are all “standard business practice” and, she noted, every expense had to be approved by Metro’s finance unit.

Oops.

So, why is the Trib and Budnick writing this tripe? Newspapers love controversy. This fake story by Budnick is much more fun than an honest one with the headline "Effective auditor shines light on Metro, wins awards, is in wide demand."

But that's the real story, based on Budnick's own words:

“...Alexis [...] cares a lot about Metro as an institution,” said former City Auditor Barbara Clark, who encouraged Dow to run for the job.

“I would describe Alexis as a highly competent professional and CPA in the work that she does,” Rasmussen said. “She sometimes takes stands that may be unpopular and may go further (on audits) than someone else who has less courage.”

...Dow hired top-notch staff, often veterans of the federal General Accounting Office. With their help, she has won four major government auditing awards.

Metro officials resist Dow and are hypersensitive about her recommendations, local auditors said. “I think it would take these guys a long time to admit they might have made some mistakes,”said former staff auditor Jim Luckeroff.

So, why would Dow hire outside PR and audit professionals to help her conduct and present her audits? Perhaps because "Metro officials resist Dow and are hypersensitive about her recommendations."

Personally, I believe there's a cabal of Metro groupies and fanatics -- including current and former staff as well as some elected officials -- who want Metro to be more unaccountable, who see honest folks like Dow as an impediment to their secretive impulses, and who are hoping to torpedo her re-election.

Nothing else explains the sudden appearance of a hit piece like this, at this time, aimed at this target, with so little behind it.

New Interstate Bridge?

Good site suggesting an alternative to the current gridlock: a new west side interstate bridge. See Portland Transport for an alternative, anti-auto view.

Anti-Carousel Demonstrations: is Civil Disobedience Next?

It is astonishing to me that Oregon police officers will staff the illegal Carousels of Information and keep taxpayers out. This implies that I - or you - could be arrested for attempting to access the government services we ARE entitled to, while protesting theft by people who are NOT entitled to those services.

Is the next step going to be trespass and civil disobedience? Will we see Daniel leading sit-ins and sing-alongs of "We Shall Overcome"?

We live in strange times when our own government treats citizens as second-class, and illegals as first-class.

Atkinson's Whiny Day

Jason Atkinson got spanked on the air by Lars Larson on Friday 03-Feb-06. I missed his previous day's appearance so I was catching the story mid-way, but Lars was convinced that Jason was in favor of broad amnesty for illegal aliens.

Leaving aside the merits of the amnesty discussion, I want to look at Atkinson's performance as a public speaker. He was clearly frustrated. His interviewer (Lars) was a long time supporter now grown hostile, or at least adversarial. Atkinson seemed to feel Lars wasn't hearing him; Lars seemed to feel Atkinson was playing word games.

Atkinson sounded whiny. I hate to say it because it sounds rude, but I'm being honest. Atkinson's voice went high and his tone grew plaintive. He felt beat up and abandoned and wasn't afraid to say it; yet he said it in a self-pitying way that wasn't appealing.

This is tough ground. Being at odds with your interviewer can make you seem unpleasant and argumentative. Standing your ground can make you seem stubborn. Yielding makes you look weak. Gentleness can seem wimpy and assertiveness can seem rude.

In this case, Atkinson ended up sounding whiny.

There are some techniques one can use to handle this a little better, but they are tough to do and require a lot of experience and practice. (These are techniques, not tricks. They only work if you're honest.)

One is, restate your interviewer's position, and then touch first on the points where you agree. Don't do it to camouflage the areas of disagreement, but rather to break up the negative back-and-forth rhythm of arguing, and to find at least a little common ground:

"Lars, your position seems to be that tomatos are not a fruit and therefore should not be treated as a fruit for tax purposes. Have I got that right? And I want you to know that I agree with you that it's wrong to take anything that isn't a fruit, and apply a fruit tax to it. It's wrong. Now here is where we disagree: to my understanding, a fruit is defined as the edible flesh surrounding a seed or seeds. By that definition, a tomato is a fruit and must be taxed as one."

In this fictional example, I've stated my position and stood my ground without making myself disagreeable. I've also found something to agree on, and made it clear that I've heard the other side.

Another is the "retrenchment" or slight retreat to a more defensible position.

"Lars, maybe I'm wrong on the tomato. I'm not a botanist. I'm always happy to learn more. But I'm quite certain that I oppose dishonest taxes."

There are others. The point is, a skilled and experienced speaker can manage a tough interview while still sounding statesmanlike.

Unfortunately, Atkinson didn't manage to sound statesmanlike. At least not this time. Fortunately, few elections hinge on a single interview - most campaigns are a marathon not a sprint. He can still shake this off and return to the fray with a renewed focus on calm, poise, and dignity.