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Driving Change and Getting Results Conference:
Exploring Approaches to Performance Measures and Community Indicators in the Cascadia Region

Meydenbauer Center
11100 N.E. 6th St.
Bellevue, Washington
Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005
8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

(Note: Speech delivered at a two-day regional conference focusing on the use of performance measures and community indicators to achieve desired outcomes.)

Good morning.

I am delighted to be opening this conference on performance measures and community indicators. For those of you from outside of the immediate area, I'd like to offer you a hearty welcome to beautiful Bellevue and King County.

I would first like to begin by thanking the team of people from Sustainable Seattle and King County, and other members of the planning committee who have played a major part in organizing and hosting this event. I would also like to thank the Sloan Foundation for all of their important contributions to this conference.

The famed Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach once said that "An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise."

And that's what I think the conference is really about: converting promise into performance.

I was asked to share with you why measures and indicators are important for my work as a manager of a large enterprise, and how they make us work better. I'd like to say right off that I believe that using measures and indicators are fundamental tools for assessing service delivery, improving operational efficiency, holding government accountable, and most importantly, building public trust in our institutions.

Those are pretty high-powered claims for an area that some have dismissed as mere "bean counting." But I think that performance and indicator information is essential for government agencies to collect and track and, most importantly, manage our operations and improve our policies to ensure we are fulfilling the public mandates we have been entrusted to carry out.

These last few years have been challenging times for local government. We have all been dealing with reduced budgets, increased expectations, and new mandates from the public and the federal government.

As the words "do more with less" have become a daily mantra for those of us in government, we need better information about where we are doing well and where we can improve. We also need more information about why things are working or why they are not. Without performance measures telling us how we are doing as a government agency, we can't answer those questions. Without indicators of community well being, we don't know what policies are effective or where we are headed as a community.

King County has had many successes in the field of performance measurement. They have been a key driver behind our ability to transform our transit and wastewater divisions, and our entire Department of Natural Resources and Parks, into agencies with national stature. This is one of the biggest reasons why we have been able to successfully reduce our total number of departments from 14 to just 7 today, cutting more than 130 million dollars in general fund expenses. I'll give you one example. Recently, King County's Solid Waste Division was able to save roughly $7 million in their annual budget while still maintaining a high customer satisfaction score. It's exactly the type of increased efficiency and improved bottom-line results we need from our agencies.

We're getting ready for our next major step forward. It's called "KingStat." KingStat is modeled after the leading performance measurement systems being hailed across the country, such as New York's CompStat, Baltimore's CitiStat, and now Washington State's G-MAP, which is an acronym for Government Management, Accountability and Performance.

We'll be taking existing performance information and using it to make significant improvements in our operations, our management practices, and our overall results for the people of King County. Fortunately, there are many areas in which the county already excels and KingStat will also give us the ability to more clearly identify those successes and deploy the lessons learned from those experiences to improve other areas.

We'll be using geographic information systems to collect data and identify "hot spot" problem areas. And we'll use the information to communicate with our residents, stakeholders, and other governmental entities about our goals, strategies, and improvements. KingStat will be a tool designed to ensure that we have a common vision for the most daunting challenges in society: eliminating homelessness, ensuring a vibrant economy, protecting our vital natural resources, and providing social services for those most in need.

And based on what we've recently seen from Hurricane Katrina, performance measurement is a critical component for effective emergency management planning.

At the same time, King County is a leader in the field of Community Indicators. Nine years ago, we collaborated with all our cities to establish a "Benchmark Program" to track our progress in managing growth. The King County Benchmark Program reports annually on 45 indicators of our quality of life. It informs elected officials, staff and citizens about the impact of our policies on the environment, our land use and our housing.

So, the work you do here today is incredibly important for the efficient execution of government - probably more important now than ever. It helps people like me do a better job. It helps me communicate to the public what we are getting done. It helps me focus my attention as a manager on the next challenge. As an executive with budget responsibilities, performance measures help me show why we need to put our best efforts into very specific areas. And it helps me as an elected official to gain the trust that all elected officials are dependent on for their work: the people's trust.

Thank you for being here today and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.

Updated: Nov. 28, 2005

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