Arnie Fielkow calls for ‘report card’ to determine how city is meeting budget targets
May 31, 2011 – Times-Picayune - Members of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration might be forgiven if they start to feel as if they are back in school, periodically awaiting the release of their latest report cards.
Last week, a coalition of more than 30 organizations committed to reforming New Orleans government gave the mayor and his team mostly favorable grades on their first year in office.
The group, Forward New Orleans, gave Landrieu’s administration assessments of “good progress” in six of the seven areas it surveyed, including crime, blight, city finances and economic development. It issued a grade of “satisfactory progress” in the seventh area, city services and infrastructure.
Now, Councilman Arnie Fielkow, chairman of the Budget Committee, has proposed devoting a day in late July or early August to getting a detailed “report card” from the administration on how it is doing in meeting all the targets established last year as it crafted the city’s 2011 budget under the “budgeting for outcomes” approach.
Before the council starts considering the 2012 budget, Fielkow wants to know whether all the promised 2011 “outcomes” are going to be achieved, and he wants the Budget Committee and other relevant council committees, such as Sanitation and Public Works, to meet together to hear the administration’s report.
He discussed the idea with Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin last week and followed it up with a letter Thursday to all his colleagues.
“Between the performance measures in (budgeting for outcomes) and our collective oversight of them, we are reinventing the way New Orleans spends its public dollars, ” Fielkow wrote. But he said it is up to the various committees to make sure the departments are truly meeting their goals.
When the administration tried several weeks ago to report to the council on how it was doing on goals such as reducing blight, some members found the presentation long on descriptions of bureaucratic procedures and short on statements of results.
Last week, though, Councilwoman Stacy Head’s Public Works Committee got a sample of the kind of specifics she and others like: a report of 22,695 potholes filled through April 30, or 76 percent of the full year’s target of 30,000, with 85 percent of the total accomplished by the “pothole killer” machine and the rest filled in manually.
Fielkow said he wants every committee to demand answers about whether the programs it oversees are meeting their goals. “We should be prepared to ask (and the administration should be prepared to answer) about the implementation of every single line item in the budget, ” he wrote his colleagues.
