How Nevada’s Second-Biggest City Measures Resident Satisfaction

Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.

More than 330,000 people live in Henderson, Nev., just outside Las Vegas. And the vast majority of them are happy to be there, according to a series of community satisfaction surveys.

Around the year 2000, Henderson’s City Council adopted a goal to make it “America’s premier community,” says Richard Derrick, the city manager and CEO. For the last few decades, the city’s leadership and workforce have been trying to define what that means. In the process, they’ve been doggedly pursuing independent assessments and reviews by participating in programs like Bloomberg’s What Works Cities, submitting their emergency services and other departments to a variety of accreditation programs, and surveying residents about their satisfaction with public services.

One set of guidelines Henderson uses is the Baldrige Excellence Framework, which helps private and public organizations self-assess their efficiency and success according to a series of criteria, from community satisfaction to financial stability. This year, Henderson won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a recognition typically given to private organizations. The award cites resident satisfaction, workforce loyalty and engagement, the city’s sustained high bond rating and growth of its reserve funds, and other indicators of efficiency and quality of life.

Derrick has worked in the Henderson city government since 1999, becoming city manager in 2017. He recently spoke with Governing about the Baldrige award and the city’s efforts to maintain satisfaction among residents and the workforce. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this award come about for Henderson? 

This has been a labor of love, for me anyway. Our vision that our council came up with back in 2000 was really to be America’s premier community. The question came up, “what does premier mean?” For us, in trying to answer that for our employees and communities, what we’ve found over time was that the Baldrige framework really works for us. It looks at continuous learning, leadership, operations, workforce, all these elements that help you define how you provide services and also create systems that help you to get better. That’s how we connected with Baldrige and that happened around 2009. I’ve been at this for 14 years, believe it or not.

So it’s adopting a set of principles that guides decision-making? 

Right. We’re looking at how to become that premier community. But we’re also looking at how to raise the bar, improve our service delivery to our citizenry, and how to measure that. So we’ve created all the mechanisms to give us data to make data-informed decisions. Guiding principles for us have always been about improving those services. How do we learn from others? Are there best practices out there that we don’t know about? Our departments have spent a lot of time going through accreditation processes.

It’s about measuring. It’s about resource allocation and diverting resources to those areas where you need to make improvements. And it’s about always engaging with your community: What is important to them? What are the areas where you’re strong and what are the areas where you could improve?

Can you give me an example of a way that you moved the needle in one of these areas? You talk about continuous improvement, but how do you get from A to B or B to C? What have you done specifically to improve services? 

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Public safety is one of the areas that the community is most interested in. Emergency response times obviously are very important to them. As we got more mature with data, we were able to segment that data into geographical areas of the city. We could pinpoint areas in the city where our response time was very fast and other areas where we were lagging.

That’s the type of information we would use to determine where our next fire station was going to go, to be able to move the needle and then come back and say, we invested in a new fire station. What has that done to our response times? That’s the feedback loop. You get the empirical information from asking how the community feels about you. But we also have hard data about how we’re responding. We have systems in place today where we monitor operational data monthly. We look at our strategic plan quarterly. We put mechanisms in place to make sure we’re accountable to ourselves and accountable to the community.

I’d love to hear one or two other examples of ways you’ve taken in this feedback about how to improve and implemented specific strategies to address it.

As I mentioned before, education is not a core to the city, but it always comes up as a top area for improvement for our community. What we’ve done there is we’ve gone through and put together an education team. We’ve gone to the Legislature and allowed ourselves to become a charter authority, to create charter schools ourselves. We can augment what the public school offering is, and charter high-performing schools to give our families school choice, and create competition. That’s an area that we would never have thought about engaging in had it not been so important to our community. That’s where you have to ask and really listen to what’s important to your constituents.

We also put together a community education advisory board that reviews data from the school district, where they’re doing well and not doing well. We’ve spent millions of dollars trying to augment and supplement what’s happening in our public schools as well. One last example. We’re creating our own preschool. We have one right now that’s run out of a rec center. But we’re constructing a preschool now to work on early childhood, because a lot of the data suggests that you can really make an improvement in kids before they even get to kindergarten. We’re a little bit outside of our lane, but we want to be innovative and create the holistic quality of life that our community is expecting.

When and why did you start tracking levels of satisfaction with city services? And how do you do that? 

We began that around 1999 or 2000 when we built our first strategic plan. As a foundational piece, we went out to the community to ask, what’s important to you and how are we doing in those areas?

Of course, there were many things we expected to hear back. Public safety was very important, police, fire services. Surprisingly education was very important to them. We’d have never known that had we not asked. Education is not even a core service of the city, but it’s one of those things that we can engage in and partner to try to improve. Using that information, we’re able to put together our strategic plan, use that data, create strategies to move the needle, and come back again every other year and ask again how we’re doing.

It’s this constant learning process for us to continue to check in and improve. I’m proud to say that today we’ve matured to this place where we’re at the top of our game in almost every department across the entire organization.

How specifically do you collect the feedback from the community about their levels of satisfaction with these things? 

We do that through a third party. From our perspective, it needed to be independent so we’re not drinking our own Kool-Aid. We also contract with a group that does that nationwide. We do it every other year. We do our community satisfaction survey using the even years, and then we do businesses in the odd years. They’re usually a predetermined set of questions, but sometimes we’ll add some if we’re interested in a certain area. Like today, conservation is a big important thing, so we add some conservation questions in. The value to that is not only looking at the trends year over year but also comparing ourselves to our peers of like-sized cities.

This year we were in the top 5 percent in the nation for our results as far as quality of life. Some of those key metrics that talk about their experiences here, raising their families, can they be employed here, all those elements put us in the top 5 percent nationally. They administer this survey in the exact same way everywhere, the same questions. You’re really able to say how you’re doing against a city in Ohio, a city in Florida. To be in the top 5 percent was absolutely a thrill for us.

Are there processes or tactics from the private sector that you’ve tried to apply to the public sector? 

I’m from the private sector, so I have experience in the private and public sectors. From our perspective, running ourselves like a business and making sure we’re efficient and can make sure we give great services at a low cost to our citizenry is always important. We have one of the lowest property tax rates in the state and some of the highest levels of service delivery. It’s finding that balance.

Sometimes you’ve got to experiment, be creative and innovative. We have some examples where we’ve actually enhanced our services at a lower cost. We had a paramedic position created in our fire department because we had combined firefighter and paramedic positions that were expensive, but I could create a paramedic-only position that was cheaper and could provide services in a different way. That worked out very well.

Are there things you’ve done to improve services that haven’t worked out? 

As an example of how the private sector isn’t always the answer, we were outsourcing some of our park maintenance, and the companies that were doing the work sometimes didn’t have the same ownership as an employee would. It’s really trying to find that balance of what works well for you, and what gets you the biggest bang for your buck, and what gets you the ownership and engagement from your own team member, and that sense of pride of owning the park and being part of that community. We’re experimenting with both and trying to see the return. Sometimes it’s a hybrid. I’ve got some parks where I’ve got very experienced park maintenance folks working out there but we have a supplemental contract for some of the lower-skilled areas where we partner with the private sector. You can look at different models of delivery and find the most efficient model.

So you’re not being ideological about how you perform these various functions? 

Yes. It’s more than just Baldrige because we also partnered with other entities looking at how we do things. We do accreditation: Our fire department is triple-accredited. We have a listing of all the departments and how they have their accreditations. But we also have partnered with Bloomberg in the past. We’re certified Gold in the What Works Cities program. So there’s other avenues where we’re looking for those comparisons, especially peer to peer or having that third party look at the way you’re doing things and giving you that feedback. That’s really why I like Baldrige so much, is that we would get these reports from them when they would come out and look at our operations. They’re called OFIs — opportunities for improvement. I always tell my team: Feedback is a gift. I love getting those OFI reports because it’s an opportunity for us to say, “Hey, here’s somebody looking at us from the outside. Here’s what they’re saying.” It may be a blind spot to us. It’s another element of how we can improve ourselves.

Have there been detractors on any of these things? Strategies you’ve used to make improvements where people have said, that’s not what the city’s role should be? 

There’s always some cynicism. Sometimes you hear, “You’re just trying to get an award.” It’s not about the award. It’s about showing improvement. It’s about constantly evaluating yourself: Are you moving the needle? Are you raising the bar? Just keeping your eye focused on the goal. The award is external validation, but there’s nothing worse than people drinking their own Kool-Aid and saying, “Oh, we’re the premier community,” but not having any data or facts to back that up. To me, when you’re trying to be the best of the best, you have to really do the work and make sure that the data supports what you’re saying.