Citizen-Driven Government Performance

MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY -

CASE IN BRIEF

Montclair, New Jersey is an economically and racially diverse community of 38,000 people located approximately 12 miles west of New York City. In 1997, the Sloan Foundation funded a three-year citizen-driven government performance project in Montclair because of its long and well-documented history of citizen participation and close proximity to Rutgers-Newark and the National Center for Public Productivity (NCPP).

The project began with the convening of numerous, informal meetings with citizens, citizen groups, elected officials and municipal managers to develop an understanding of two critical aspects of the township:

How do citizens, municipal managers and elected officials communicate and interact with each other?

How do citizens, municipal managers and elected officials determine the Township of Montclair is doing a good job providing services?

Participants were asked how they know the township is doing a good job. The response from community stakeholders indicated that most measures of performance at the time were subjective. “The streets are pretty clean.” “I feel safe in my neighborhood.”

The overall project goal was to involve stakeholders in assessing and improving government performance, and influencing how government services could be made more responsive to community needs. In support of that goal, the project sought to:

Have citizens intimately involved in identifying issues and measures of performance.
Support the use of performance indicators in public decision processes.
Develop a partnership built among citizens, local government, and Rutgers University.
Encourage participating citizens, elected officials and government administrators to learn from each other and from related projects across the country; and
Develop a long-term institutional capacity to support citizen participation.

The NCPP involved as many people as possible in identifying service delivery areas and community conditions that were priorities for citizens, and developed ways to measure performance related to those issues. The NCPP team worked with citizens to identify their aspirations for Montclair and helped citizens and municipal managers connect performance issues and indicators to those aspirations and to municipal program budget objectives. In particular, the Montclair project:

Demonstrated the citizens’ ability to work effectively with performance issues and select performance indicators. Citizen participation resulted in fourteen major themes that summarized the outcomes citizens expected from government. They also identified over sixty potential indicators for measuring performance related to those themes.

Developed citizen-driven “aspirational goals” for Montclair. A “Goals-setting Weekend” generated over 100 ideas that were clustered into six “Aspirational Goals” and were used to frame how citizens and township managers worked with performance measures.

Resulted in the first citizen satisfaction survey for Montclair, designed and conducted by citizens. Citizens on the “survey committee,” and others who attended open meetings, developed survey questions related to municipal service delivery and aspirational goals. NCPP worked with this committee to hone citizen ideas into usable questions and conducted a volunteer-driven, community-wide survey of citizen perceptions of Montclair.

Analyzed municipal department objectives based on the aspirational goals, and refined indicators for performance reporting.

Analyzed objectives for each municipal department. Objectives that related to internal administrative processes and one-time projects were stripped away, leading to focused lists of between 8 and 10 performance indicators for each aspirational goal.

Established a citizen advisory committee on performance measurement.

Helped create an advisory committee in the township to institutionalize this process and insure that performance measurement and citizen involvement remain a priority for the township.

Written by Kathe Callahan. She is assistant professor at Rutgers University-Newark. Reprinted with permission from the PA TIMES, monthly newspaper of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), www.aspanet.org.

Background Information