Meeting Recap

by Tim Dobler and Rick Osborn

AGA board member Bill D'Elia introduced Rich as the Performance and Outreach Coordinator, for the Finance Department, City of Bellevue.  Rich came to Bellevue from Washington DC, where he held a similar position.  As a non-accountant (his degree is in Communications), Rich brought new ideas to building the city's budget around performance goals rather than just balancing the books.

Rich discussed the steps the City of Bellevue took in order to be more responsive to the needs of its citizens.  Getting citizen feedback was the first major task.

Initially, 47 service areas were identified where Bellevue provided services to its citizens.  The 47 areas could be broken down into several subareas.  The total areas and subareas was too many to analyze and expect the public to consider when rating the services of the city.

While on a visit to a doctor, Rich hit upon the idea of limiting the areas for feed back to a narrow number of "vital signs" to give a sense of how the city is doing.  Rather than 47 service areas, Rich honed the list down to 16 items.

In order to find out how the city was doing in the 16 areas, Rich wanted to perform a scientifically valid sample of opinions of the people of Bellevue.  The cost of such a survey was not in the budget.  However, Rich arranged a grant from the National Center for Civic Innovation that covered the bulk of the costs.

With funding lined up, Rich invited volunteers to participate in focus groups to discuss what was important to them.  The volunteers were selected in such a way as to assure a representation that mirrored the city's population.  The results included some expected results - improving traffic flow and emergency response time were high on people's lists.  An unexpected result was that the people surveyed really liked a newspaper discussing city operations that the city turned out periodically and mailed to all Bellevue households.  At the time of the survey, the city was contemplating canceling the paper.  Additionally, the volunteers suggested another 13 areas that are being evaluated for inclusion in the city's reporting.

Armed with the results of the survey, and some follow up information, Rich was able to recommend changes in reporting and prioritizing delivering services to bring the government products more in line with what the people want.

The AGA recognition came as a result of the methods of collecting the data and implementation.

Rich provided some hand outs, and used a PowerPoint presentation during the talk.  Copies of the material is available through Bill.