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Mayor-elect invites other city leaders to share successes
By Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News
June 26, 2003
In Austin, Texas, city managers gave airport janitors the power to decide how to best clean concourses and bathrooms and the freedom to determine their own schedules.
In Baltimore, a new mayor swiped New York City's crime-fighting program and adapted it to attack all kinds of other problems.
In Oakland, Calif., city leaders convinced workers that their ideas for cutting the budget were being taken seriously.
In Denver?
That's the question for hundreds of volunteers serving on 29 transition committees set up by Mayor-elect John Hickenlooper. And Wednesday, Hickenlooper gave the teams that are helping him identify ideas for his administration a presentation that was part pep talk, part policy primer.
"Our goal today is not to endorse or veto any of these ideas or paths," Hickenlooper said, "but to listen and learn."
Hickenlooper put together a transition hierarchy that is designed to examine every aspect of Denver's government. He has insisted that transition teams look at the "best ideas" and "best practices" before they try to find the "best people" to fill dozens of key jobs.
Wednesday, he gave them a look at the kinds of things leaders in other cities are doing. So he brought in Austin's former city manager, the head of Baltimore's technology-based system for attacking various problems, and the chief of staff for Oakland's city manager.
And he had some hometown talent, too - Dr. Patricia Gabow, head of the Denver health system.
Their charge: Share ideas - especially ones considered new and innovative - with the men and women who will help Hickenlooper remold Denver's government after he takes office July 21.
Camille Barnett, a public policy consultant and formerly Austin's city manager, talked about how the Texas city transformed the way its workers went about their jobs.
The bottom line? Employees were given more power to make decisions, both on how they carried out their jobs and how they settled complaints from the public. So when someone called in with a problem on a utility bill, the worker on the end of the line could handle it instead of turning to a supervisor for guidance.
And she talked about incentives, something Hickenlooper is big on bringing to Denver city government.
"Don't underestimate the power of recognition," Barnett said.
In Baltimore, Leif Dormsjo has overseen a program that the city's mayor, Martin O'Malley, has dubbed "CitiStat." Basically, it's an offshoot of a New York City program that used technology to analyze crime trends and assign cops to troubled areas.
The process was known as "putting the cops on the dots."
Baltimore is using it to create maps and charts showing everything from abandoned homes to areas marred by graffiti to city agencies where workers were often skipping shifts.
"The maps don't tell us where the white people live, where the black people live, where the poor people live, where the rich people live," Dormsjo said. "They tell us where the problems are. That's where we go."
In Oakland, city workers weren't happy when a consultant was brought in to look for ways to make up a budget shortfall but warmed to the idea "once they realized we really meant it, that we really were looking for their advice," said Dana Bryson, chief of staff to the city's manager.
And Gabow talked about the changes at Denver Health and Hospitals, which broke away from the city in 1997 to become a quasi-independent governmental entity.
In the process, it changed the way pay levels were established - looking at specific jobs instead of "job families" as had been done before. And they introduced more flexibility to the hiring process.
"If we have to pay a sign-on bonus for nurses, we do," she said. "But we don't have to do it for everyone or even for all nurses."
She cited two signs that point to an agency where people want to work, where those who have jobs want to sacrifice for the greater good.
Last year, 50,000 people applied for jobs at Denver Health. And when managers asked employees to volunteer to take unpaid time off in a budget crunch, enough of them did to save $1.8 million.
"I think that says they own it, they love it, they want it to do well," she said.
Please contact Camille for more information.
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