Public Management of Elections

Interview with Angela Holmes, City Clerk of Westbrook

This is the second clip on ensuring integrity of voting I discuss absentee ballots with Angela Holmes

Voting Integrity Election Day

Since I teach and work on public management issues, I don't discuss politics. However, it's important for people to know about the management side of ensuring voting integrity. That's what City Clerks do.
I discuss ensuring that citizens are eligible to vote in this first clip. In the second clip I discuss ensuring that citizens don't vote twice when they use an absentee ballot.  Each is with Angela Holmes, City Clerk, for Westbrook Maine, a community with about 15,000 people.

I Love a Parade

Three reasons for “I love a parade.” 

Your city or Chamber of Commerce may be sponsoring parade or festival this summer or in fall.  Ask yourself three questions:

Do your employees want to participate? 

It can be a lot of fun. It might involve creating a float, a booth, dressing up in shirts that id your nonprofit.  However, it doesn’t necessarily serve your mission, and it may take employees away from their jobs. You have to consider how you will pay them.  

If the answer to the question is Yes, go to question 2 if

No, stop.

     Is it good for publicity? 

That depends upon the audience.  If it’s a parade, more than likely there will families and young children.  If your clients are teenagers, they won’t be there.  Maybe, the fair brings in people from out of town so they will begin to recognize your work.  It’s a chance to hand out a few brochures too.  

If the answer to question 2 is Yes, go to question 3, if

 

No, stop.

      Does it generate revenue either directly or indirectly?

This one doesn’t apply to municipalities but just to nonprofits.  Are there opportunities either directly at the festival or indirectly through a related fundraiser to generate revenue?  Sometimes you can rent a booth for a nominal fee.  A nonprofit had a rubber-ducky fundraiser in the summer along with other summer city activities.  People bought rubber duckies to float down a small stream.  It was a lot of work retrieving rubber duckies.  If it’s fun for employees, and it generates great publicity, you still might want to participate.  Still keep in mind each year, what you are trying to accomplish.

Asylum Seekers and Catholic Charities

A complicated process for a tiny city
I speak with  Inza Ouattara (pronounced Enza Wattara) who works for Catholic Charities, Refugee Services, how Catholic Charities is helping  asylum seekers in Portland ME, a city of 67,000.  Approximately 250 asylum seekers from the Congo and Angola arrived from the Texas/Mexican border in June.  Dr. Ouattara holds a ED.D (Univ of New England)  and MPPM (University of Southern Maine).

  

Area town and city managers have met to determine how they might help.  Donations have been collected by area charities.  These "asylum seekers" have not gone through the process of being determined eligible for asylum seeker status.  Once that is complete, then they apply for asylum seeker status. Federal law does not allow refugees to apply for services for 150 days after gaining "parole status."  The state has relaxed its laws to allow these seekers to apply for general assistance  and food stamps.  General assistance is provided by towns with partial funding by the state.  The state as of July 2019 is still determining what, if any, funding it will provide to Portland for general assistance for these new refugees. 

Pragmatism and Reorganization

If you are in a state with a new governor, you may have already heard news about restructuring, reorganizing, consolidating, privatizing government.  Reorganization happens in large nonprofits and cities, too, but it is not quite as apparent.  The problem with reorganizing, no matter what word used is that there are few ways to measure success. Research doesn’t tell what the best way to reorganize is. 

Three reasons pop up for why your agency might be reorganizing 1) to improve efficiency, 2) to improve program effectiveness, 3) to serve a tactical or symbolic end.  Most reorganizations profess to improve efficiency.  We’d need to measure costs now and after the reorganization takes place to know whether that is true.  The same is true of program effectiveness.  Did the reorganization improve the ability of th agency to serve its clients?  You may remember that Homeland Security was created by merging agencies under this new umbrella.  Is it doing better at preventing or halting terrorism?  Prevention by its very nature is difficult to measure.  The last one is tactical.  Agencies might be reorganized to show that a new boss is taking an interest, wants work to be done differently than in the past.  This reason may get a bad rap, but it’s not very different than the others since the result is unlikely to be measured.

I’d say there is one more reason.  It’s purely pragmatic.  You’ve lost a crucial staff member; you’ve lost a space to work or added a space.  Two communities near me are sharing a police chief and calls. It occurred after one police chief left.  Yes, it may improve efficiency and effectiveness.  It may save money in the long run, but the time was right.  Here’s another purely pragmatic one, a urologist and an orthopedist sharing an office.  I bet that was pragmatic.  The schedules worked well enough that they could share an AA, and office space was right.

A tongue in Cheek look at creating a performance management systems: Outcome Measures

New England performance measures. A tongue in cheek look at creating a Performance Management System or How to love a Puffy Coat.  OUTPUTS

The first thing we have to do is start with our mission. States don’t usually have missions or visions but they do have slogans, motto. We’ll use Maine to start our example.  We could use the state flag-Dirigo.  That means I Lead.  Not sure that’s so helpful.  How about the license plate slogan, Vacationland, ok but a little narrow.  A lot of people add a bumper sticker that says not on vacation so you're going to meet resistance.  Maine the Way Life Should Be or Maine Open for business.  I’m going to choose Maine the Way Life Should Be. It’s vague so the next thing you will want is a committee to help promote performance measures and choose and define measures.

Let’s drop it down to apply performance measures to you.

Here’s one: the number of pairs of mittens or gloves you have at the end of the winter.  It’s an output, activities conducted to get to the result you want. O is best

How about #number of different types of winter boots you have. That may have a bias because it might be measuring wealth

How about the last day you wear your puffy coat?  If you want to get technical, it’s really the number of days between, say, Nov 1 and April 1 that you wore it. The reverse could be used, the first time you put on your bathing suit.  I have friends who wait for the perfect day and then it slips by.

We very often put our measures into ratios so the number of mittens and gloves lost/compared to the grand total mittens and gloves you have at the end of the winter. If you have 5 pairs of gloves or mittens and you lose 2 2/10 =That’s 20%

But we really  want to know about the results of our actions We want to measure the way life should be.

So let’s measure the number of winter activities you participated in:  hiking, snowshoeing.  Do you think snow shoveling counts?  Let the committee be the judge.

We really need to balance it.  Always balance your measures so one doesn’t drive the others. Add number of summer activities, # of days you hiked, swam, biked. Does it count if you sat around the pool?  Here comes the committee again. 

Ah Now we are getting closer to Maine the way life should be.

OUTCOMES 

Let’s look at an outcome, the result you want…Maine the way life should be.  Well you can use the number of summer activities and number of winter activities to create an outcome measure. They are proxies for Maine the Life should be. We are assuming getting out of doors is important

You’ll probably want to turn it into a percent of time spent on weekends or something like that or we could use the number of days, 90 that we count as summer or winter. 

All play and no work is not going to create Maine the Way Life should be. Remember that slogan open for business.  It’s an outcome we want to measure, so let’s add in the average of wage for a financial measure.

Finally, you might want to find out how satisfied your family and friends are going out in the winter or summer.  That the long term outcome.  We don’t want people to feel they have to leave and become snow birds or have to go to Disney world with their kids in the winter. Maybe they didn’t like the camping trip in the summer but did like the trip to the beach in the summer. You need to know

You might be pretty discouraged after you collect this data on number of winter activites and summer. You’ve got a great 1 to 1 ration if you had 1 activity for summer and one for winter.  But one out of 90 days isn’t very good. I’ll talk about process measures next time that will help you.  Thanks for listening.

Begin of Performance Management System

5 QUICK STEPS FOR RISK MANAGEMENT

         1.    Explain the workers comp process.  Even in today’s office work environment, young and senior employees can fall (and break wrists)

2.       Create common sense rules. The longer your policies, the less likely they are to be read.  It’s true you may need to have more extensive rules for key personnel.  Depending upon the type of organization, you might need a full-fledged emergency management plan, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs the details.  Any plan needs to be flexible.  No one in Gander Newfoundland could have expected that all planes heading to the East Coast would have been detoured to Canada on 9/11. (See my Sept blog)

3.       Orient and train new employees immediately.  We used to be able to be more casual about when people were oriented.  If you provide services to kids, employees need to know the rules and reporting requirements on the first day.

4.       Expect that accidents do happen. Hospitals always have extensive orientations.  During an orientation on back care by an appropriate staff member, a new employee threw out her back.  One of the major workplace accidents is a back injury. 

5.       Check computers for viruses, etc. If you’re a large organization, you have a routine, but if you are a small nonprofit you need to be wary that your employees are up up-to-date. Go check.