Performance Measurement in Municipal Government: Assessing the State of the Practice

Performance measurement has been part of the lexicon of public administration in the United States for several decades, but rhetoric has outdistanced practice by far in this area. Currently, however, there is a renewed interest in performance measures as an essential element of the results-oriented management movement that is sweeping the field, as reflected in legislative mandates and administrative initiatives as well as considerable conference and training activity and a revived stream of books and articles on the subject. Nevertheless, the extent to which performance measurement has taken hold in a meaningful way in public agencies is still an open question, particularly with respect to local government. Based on a survey of U.S. cities with populations of 25,000 and over, this article explores the extent to which performance measures are used and how they are used in contemporary municipal government. The Quest For Performance Measurement Performance measurement is an old idea that has taken on renewed importance. Measuring workload and worker efficiency was clearly part of the scientific management approach at the turn of the century, and the International City Management Association produced a publication on measuring municipal activities as early as 1943 (Ridley and Simon, 1943). In more modern times concern for measuring the performance of public programmatic entities arose with the interest in program budgeting in the 1960s and program evaluation in the 1970s. Harry Hatry and colleagues at the Urban Institute began publishing materials that promoted the use of performance measures and provided instruction on how to develop and use them (Hatry and Fisk, 1971; Waller, et al., 1976; Hatry, et al., 1977), while other authors talked about how to incorporate them in larger management processes (Altman, 1979; Epstein, 1984; Steiss, 1985; Wholey, 1983). A related but different stream of articles focused on performance measures as they play into the budgeting process (Grizzle, 1985; 1987; Brown and Pyers, 1988). Yet it has generally been understood that the promise and potential of performance measures greatly exceed their actual usefulness in practice. Indeed, one of the underlying premises of Downs and Larkey's The Search for Government Efficiency (1986) was that for a variety of reasons most governmental jurisdictions did not have the capability of measuring the performance of their programs. Performance Measurement in an Era of Public Management Reform A number of forces in the field of public administration have led to a renewed, or reinvigorated, interest in performance measurement in the 1990s. Taxpayer revolts, pressure for the privatization of public services, legislative initiatives aimed at controlling runaway spending, and the devolution of many responsibilities to lower levels of government have generated increased demands to hold government agencies accountable to legislatures and the public in terms of what they spend and the results they produce. In addition, the reinventing government movement initiated by Osborne and Gaebler in 1992 and Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review in 1993 have called for a new way of thinking about how public agency performance is defined and measured. Driven in part by these external pressures and in part by their own motivation to provide cost-effective public services, public managers have been using a variety of approaches to strengthen the management capacity of their organizations, most notably through strategic planning (Bryson, 1995; Berry and Wechsler, 1995), through more encompassing strategic management processes (Eadie, 1989; Koteen, 1991; Vinzant and Vinzant, 1996), through quality management programs and reengineering processes (Berman and West, 1995; Cohen and Brand, 1993; Davenport, 1994; Hyde, 1995; Kravchuck and Leighton, 1993), and through benchmarking practices (Bruder, 1994; Keehley, et al. 1997), as well as reformed budgeting processes (Joyce, 1993; Lee, 1997). …