Monthly Archives: October 2010

Goverment Operations/Performance

How the MMR Went MIA

Posted by Doug Turetsky, October 27, 2010

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the Mayor’s Management Report released last month was how little notice it got. Among the city’s daily newspapers, just the Daily News gave it any ink, and that was a modest 145 words.

That’s a far cry from the not so distant past, when release of the Mayor’s Management Report was a full-scale press event, resulting in significant attention from legislators, civic organizations, and the general public. Long viewed as one of the major reports coming from City Hall and a public marker of Mayoral successes and failures, the report’s stature has clearly declined.

If size is any measure of prominence, compare this year’s volume of 226 pages (plus about 206 pages of definitions and 63 pages of additional tables available online) to the management report issued by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for fiscal year 1997: there was a 112-page summary volume, a 311-page volume of agency narratives, a 308-page volume of agency and citywide indicators, and a separate volume of more than 90 charts for the press. Based on a Nexis search, stories of 500 or more words appeared in The New York Times, Daily News, and Newsday the day after the report’s release that year.

Granted, such data avalanches can bury useful information under piles of less useful information, which can enable turning the Mayor’s Management Report into more of a public relations document than what it is supposed to be, a clear presentation of its hits and misses. Point readers to what you want them to see and leave it to others to have the energy or initiative to find numbers that might be less favorable.

To its credit, the Bloomberg Administration has sought to turn the management report into a more meaningful and accessible assessment of city government performance. An emphasis was placed on indicators reflecting outcomes. Unfortunately, much useful data was dropped from the report—information essential to understanding underlying trends.

Say, for example, you’re trying to determine if the trimmed down police force, which must now also devote a lot of its energy to counterterrorism, is able to respond fast enough to calls for help. The management report used to present response times to calls of crimes in progress by borough, now there’s only a citywide number, a figure not particularly helpful given the city’s geographic size, more than 300 square miles.

Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito has introduced legislation to restore another important piece of information no longer part of the Mayor’s Management Report: the number of radio runs the police make each year related to domestic violence. The report also used to routinely tell us how many arrests there were for violations of orders of protection. This is the kind of information that can be helpful in gauging the city’s efforts to combat domestic violence. So the relevant stats—the inputs necessary to understand the outcomes—should be part of the report, or at least made available as a regularly updated online supplement.

Making the management report matter again may also be an issue of timing. When the Mayor’s Management Report was instituted in the mid-1970s, the intention was to help inform budget decisions. That intent is no less important today. In the past IBO and others have suggested the management report be released in conjunction with the Mayor’s Executive Budget. Rather than fading into the bureaucratic morass, the Mayor’s Management Report should be an essential tool during budget deliberations.

Municipal Labor

Sick Days and the City

Posted by Doug Turetsky & Bernard O’Brien, October 13, 2010

With Mayor Bloomberg making plain how much he dislikes the City Council bill that would require businesses to provide employees with paid sick leave, it seems like a good moment to look at how much sick leave is used by city workers. In fiscal year 2010 (which ended in June), city workers on average used 8.5 paid sick days—just about the nine days that the Council bill says businesses with 20 or more employees should provide for its workers.

As is often the case, averages can hide some interesting variations. There are substantial differences between the numbers of paid sick days taken by workers at different agencies. Based on data for 34 city agencies compiled by the Mayor’s office and available here, the number of paid sick days used last year by city workers (not including days lost to on-the-job injuries) ranged from 12 by uniformed correction officers to just five by staff members of the department of parks—maybe there is something to the old adage about the health benefits of outdoors work.

Or at least some kinds of outdoors work. Uniformed sanitation workers clocked in a comparatively high number of sick days. Just as working inside a jail may not be the healthiest of occupations, it’s probably no surprise given the nature of their job that sanitation workers used an average of 11.5 sick days last year. What may come as a surprise is that police officers and firefighters used fewer sick days than the citywide average: 6.6 for police and 7.0 for uniformed firefighters.

There are some other seeming anomalies in the use of paid sick days. Maybe it has something to do with being a tax collector, but over at the finance department, workers used an average of nearly 11 paid sick days last year. Perhaps working with musty documents also takes a toll on health. Staffers at the Department of Records used an average of about 10 paid sick days last year.

On the healthier side of the sick leave ledger, Landmarks Preservation Commission staff used a comparatively modest average of 6.2 sick days in 2010. And despite working for an agency whose name and mission is synonymous with stress, staff at the Office of Emergency Management averaged just 6.1 sick days.

The number of paid sick days that city employees are entitled to varies depending upon their civil service title and, in some cases, time on the job. An IBO analyst, for example, earns 10 a year, growing to 12 after five years of city employment.

Citywide, use of paid sick leave has edged downward under Mayor Bloomberg, from 9.2 days on average during his first full year in office to last year’s 8.5.