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From Governing’s
Grading the Counties introductionFebruary 2002 issue
THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Report Card:
This appears to be largely true. For example, Riverside’s managers need to get approval virtually every time they want to shift funds between budget categories — such as between personnel and travel — but “you can get that approval in a day,” one of them says. “A CEO can move so quickly that bureaucratic paperwork doesn’t get in the way of operational needs.”
The system also works pretty well financially. Back in 1998, the county was in structural deficit, essentially because many of its individual departments chronically ran over budget. The rating agencies were concerned, and Standard & Poor’s had placed Riverside on credit watch. Since then, the county has come a long way. It’s put a lock on departments — notably the sheriff’s office — to make sure they don’t exceed their funded authority. Fiscal restraint, coupled with the booming economy of the late 1990s, helped Riverside set money aside, and reassure the rating agencies as well. Meanwhile, the county has very conservative debt and investment policies; no great surprise, considering Riverside lies next door to Orange County, which in the 1990s suffered the nation’s most embarrassing local government bankruptcy in decades.
Unfortunately, while the county no longer spends more money than it takes in, it isn’t taking in enough to fund its capital maintenance needs. Even though maintenance funds have increased, dollars are still short for upkeep of both transportation and public buildings.
What’s more, Riverside faces some special challenges. It sprawls over more than 7,000 square miles, encompassing mountain, desert, waterfront and urban territory, and this strains its ability to provide services. “Even the coroner has to contract out some of his services because the county is so big that he may not be able to respond,” says Edward Corser, Riverside’s finance director. “Or if someone has a computer breakdown, nobody from the county is going to go out 180 miles to fix a computer.”
Positives: CEO structure combines flexibility and efficiency; county has eliminated annual structural deficit of $6 million to $10 million and built up strategic reserves; strong fiscal-notes process; new financial management computer system will make more data available to managers.
Negatives: Inconsistent accounting of revenues among departments; efforts to retain AAA rating through conservative investing may cost county money in long term; insufficient use of master contracts in personnel services; insufficient funding for central procurement oversight.
Positives: Most projects delivered on budget; reasonably up-to-date condition assessments; good seven-year planning process for roads and bridges; aggressive and innovative efforts to create special funding districts, development fee systems and other sources to meet needs of growing county.
Negatives: Departmental rivalries and politics play major role in project selection; capital improvement plan desperately needs updating; maintenance funding still short for both facilities and roads, although increasing; minimal effort to calculate future maintenance cost of new road projects.
Positives: Great flexibility in dealing with workforce; pay levels can be adjusted to attract good recruits; county working on study of job-classification system; new computer system providing needed workforce data; central HR office produces candidate lists speedily; heavy use of online testing; outstanding relationships with five of six unions.
Negatives: Departments too often slow down hiring process and lose good candidates; insufficient central oversight on training; no standard countywide appraisal system for employees; no employee-satisfaction surveys, although a pilot is under way; too many job classifications.
Positives: Well-distributed countywide strategic plan; generally good strategic planning at department level; increased use of citizen advisory groups; performance measurements — inputs, outputs, outcomes — used at departmental level; performance information increasingly shared on Web.
Negatives: Virtually no countywide creation or oversight of performance measurements; minimal countywide validation of departmental measures; more training in strategic planning needed; department plans don’t conform to single structure; no rigorous use of surveys.
Positives: Innovative use of information technology at agency level; growing use of GIS by agencies; county is national leader in use of Web for hiring; innovative program to properly reward IT workers; efforts in place to bring more transactions onto the Internet; reasonably good training for end-users and IT specialists.
Negatives: Some large departments struggle against entity-wide IT approach; some departmental managers still not convinced about benefits of Web-based technologies; no formal post-implementation review of new systems; lack of high-speed data services; insufficient sharing of information among agencies; financial and human resources information systems inadequate, although county currently working on solutions.
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overnment in Riverside is managerial government. The five-person board of supervisors doesn’t like to get deeply involved in the details, leaving them to the county executive officer, whom they appoint and provide with broad executive powers. “I would say they’re trusting in that sense,” says one executive-branch employee. Of course, the board is always involved in questions of priority and policy, but it’s less concerned with the intricacies of finance. Officials in Riverside like it this way, and boast that they have been able to keep their bureaucracy to a minimum while delivering management in an efficient and economic fashion.