Barrett and Greene

The largest investment in American infrastructure –  three out of every four dollars – comes from state and local governments, and that doesn’t totally account for the infrastructure created by other public entities like hospitals, universities and housing agencies. This investment is made possible partially through financing via the municipal bond tax-exemption, which serves as the cornerstone of public infrastructure financing, and thus a catalyst of American growth.

For some time, the complexity of dealing with scores of rules set forth by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has become a hefty weight for often-understaffed finance offices to carry. As a result, many state and local financial reports take many months after the end of the fiscal year to come out.

Over the course of years, we’ve come to rely on a number of organizations that specialize in various aspects of state and local government for information, expert sources, research reports and so on. In fact, we’ve gone further and become more closely involved in a few.

Many years ago, when we were first introduced to the world of performance management, we became zealots, believing that cities and states were entering a brave new world in which government services would reliably improve. Over time, we’ve become slightly less naïve about the way the world works – and understand that politics can trump information in many cases. But we still believe that skillfully assembled performance management systems have a huge amount of value even if they’re not a panacea.

For some time, we’ve been fascinated by the relationship between executive branch managers and their legislatures or city councils. Not long ago, in fact, we featured a Guest Column by a former Georgia legislator who provides advice aimed at helping agency and department managers to get their messages through to legislatures in hopes of influencing their decisions when it comes to forming a balanced budget.

A few months ago, at the American Society for Public Administration conference in Washington D.C., the Center for Accountability and Performance had a panel discussion for the recipients of its Emerging Leaders Award. We’ve been to lots of sessions similar to this one, but the moderator here, Cheriene Floyd, the chief data officer of Miami, asked the panelists a question that was particularly intriguing and that has set us to thinking ever since.

Today is “World Social Media Day,” a celebration of that form of communications that was first proclaimed in 2010 by Mashable, a media and entertainment company that delivers its content on a variety of platforms.

Many states, counties and city leaders are regularly raging against “fraud, waste and abuse.” This is hardly a new issue but inspired by the efforts in Washington D.C. – whatever you think of the administration’s approach – there’s been refreshed action at other levels of government to tackle this triad of governmental ills. Here’s the problem. These three words are generally comingled as if they were one thing. But they’re not.

We don’t have a degree in statistics. Nor are we data specialists. But after 30-plus years of using data as a basic tool in our quest to tell stories about cities, counties and states – all of which are carefully fact checked -- we’ve developed a kind of radar (not that it’s infallible by any means) for data which can be misleading, misplaced or downright wrong.

Today is the first day of Public Service Recognition Week and since much of our readership is made up by people who have devoted their lives to public service, we thought it was only appropriate for us to send you this note, in honor of the occasion. To be clear, we’re addressing these comments to the public servants whose work is largely invisible.