One Washington City's Innovative Approach to Transparency and Civic Engagement

Mark McAvoy was serving in the Air Force, stationed at McChord Air Force Base in Western Washington, when he got in a tangle with a local planning department over a retaining wall on his property. The encounter was frustrating, but also made him want to understand more about the internal workings of cities.

McAvoy’s curiosity was strong enough to motivate him to earn a Master of Public Administration degree, an “MBA for the public sector,” as he describes it. After working for the city of Houston for nearly two decades he became city administrator for Liberty Lake, a rapidly growing city of 12,000 near the Washington-Idaho border.

Since taking the job, he’s made it a priority to ensure residents are well informed about the way Liberty Lake works, from its budget priorities to its service delivery. The city was one of the first in the nation to implement a “Rethinking Budgeting” tool developed by the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), an assessment of budgeting processes designed to improve their speed and flexibility.

He's been city administrator for three years now, the job he’s wanted ever since graduate school. He talked to Governing about what he’s doing to make sure citizens of Liberty Lake have a say in government decisions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.



Governing: What are some of the things you’ve done to help residents feel they have a voice in government?

McAvoy: We've established a community engagement commission made up of volunteer members. Their sole purpose is to derive methods to get more of a cross section of the city's residents to engage regularly with the city government.

We started a community satisfaction survey, tied to our strategic plan, and it allows us to gauge how we are delivering what we said we’d prioritize in our strategic plan. We ask questions to see what the level of satisfaction generally is, and we use those results to inform our budget-making process and capital facilities plan.

Every spring we have a Citizen Academy, a class where people can come in each week for eight weeks and learn about a different department within the city. We go to the fire station, to the water and sewer district, to the police department. They have an opportunity to see the inner workings of those departments, how they make decisions and allocate resources, how they deliver services.

All of our capital projects are on the city website, and there's a widget that allows visitors to access a discussion forum about them.

We have a farmers market, and each week between May and October we have a booth there with an elected official and a member from one of our boards or commissions to answer questions about development projects, or why potholes aren’t being fixed. Kind of a living city hall.

What kinds of outcomes have you seen from this work?

At least two people who came through the academy decided that they wanted to run for City Council and were elected. We have several board and commission members who went through the academy and then decided to volunteer and become board and commission members.

We're always looking for new techniques to be able to get more voices into the mix.

You were one of the first to use the GFOA “Rethinking Budgeting” assessment. What did you learn from that?

The budget is the policy document of the city; all things are driven from the budget. I knew that there was a better way to do it, I just wasn't quite sure how to get there.

The assessment is designed to ask people that are touching different parts of the budget process an array of questions that are diagnostic and informative. What are we doing well? What do we think we're doing well, but we're not doing so well based on these opinions?

That's eye opening. One of the things we’ve taken from it is that our staff members can help us identify areas where if we just did things a little bit differently, we could either earn more revenue or save more expense.

How does the assessment relate to ensuring your budget aligns with community needs, what some call “priority-based” budgeting?

Our priority-based budgeting implementation was not connected to the assessment. The priority system allows us to connect our budget with our strategic plan. In my opinion, it’s a better way to budget, a better way to communicate about the budget and a better way to demonstrate the return on investment.

That’s the importance of getting feedback from the survey I mentioned earlier. The survey is written in the context of the strategic plan and the strategic plan is tied explicitly to the budget. When we're getting feedback on an annual basis, we're able to see that people want to see more investment in, say, crime prevention, or more investment in street maintenance.

The survey is looking backward at how we performed, and the budget is looking forward at how we plan to perform.

Lately there’s been a lot of rhetoric suggesting government is wasteful and inefficient. Are your engagement efforts making it less likely that residents see you in this way?

There's definitely an impact from what’s happening in the federal government, whether it's on social media posts or people coming to council during citizen comment.

Assuming they still live in town, people who have gone through the City Academy are able to say to anyone they talk with, for example, “Here's how the city really allocates tax revenue, and all of this information is on their website.” I hesitate to call them ambassadors, but they talk for us in the trenches.

We try to build trust, to have transparency in our communications, to never appear as though we’re behind closed doors. At no other level of government can you show up on a Tuesday night and get up to the lectern and tell your elected officials what you think. That gives us a tremendous advantage.

Any last thoughts?

There's no copy-and-paste function in this. Every government is different. You have to tailor things to your local conditions, but if you're willing to work at it and engage the community and empower staff, you can make a real difference in local government.

There's nothing like it.