by Julia C.Reischel

Six months after Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone formally staffed SomerStat, the city’s new performance improvement program that was a cornerstone of his campaign, things have begun to change in City Hall. 

“We’re way ahead,” said Curtatone of the progress made by the city’s SomerStat program. “We’ve learned good lessons and gotten excellent feedback.”

“People have really engaged with and been interested in the process,” said Stephanie A. Hirsch, whom Curtatone hired last fall to direct the program. “I think it’s very effective and productive. It produces tangible results.”

Two full-time employees, Hirsch and Michael Lambert, as well as a full-time intern currently staff the SomerStat program.

SomerStat is in the process of hiring two more interns, and will eventually have a rotating staff of three paid interns in addition to the two permanent positions, Hirsch said.

What is SomerStat?

SomerStat, which is modeled off of Baltimore’s successful CitiStat program, is a database-driven management tool that requires city departments to track information about all of their activities and to examine that information aggressively.

It is the first program of its kind to be started in the Boston area, and one of only a few programs of its kind in the country.

SomerStat is based on the assumption that accountability is the key to running an efficient and fiscally responsible government, Hirsch said.

"Relentless follow-up is key," she said.

To figure out what needs to get done, you need to have coordination among key decision makers, data to support those decisions, and ways to discover new problems, Hirsch said.

“This is the only way you can make significant progress as a manager of any organization, especially one as complex as a city government,” she said.

“We wanted to institute systematic changes to the bureaucratic mode,” said Curtatone. "We’ve never measured what’s been done in this city. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

SomerStat is an attempt to inculcate efficient private-sector business practices in municipal government, Curtatone said.

“I’ve worked in the private sector, and I know the frustrations of the lack of accountability that comes with the municipal sector," said Curtatone. "Most bureaucratic establishments miss that level of accountability."

"I’ve always advocated transferring the success of private government to city government,” he said.

How it Works

There are currently six departments—police, fire, public works, traffic, personnel, and information technology—involved in the SomerStat program, said Hirsch.
“Police, fire and the Department of Public Works are the three largest direct service departments in the city, with frequent contacts with the community, and so were the first city departments to be incorporated into the program,” she said.

“It’s an iterative process,” said Hirsch. “If the law office is needed to understand a problem, we bring them in.”

Many of the issues that came up in the first meetings related to the departments of personnel and information technology, so personnel and IT were added to the program two months ago, Hirsch said.

Hirsch, Lambert, and their staff help the six departments gather and process raw information such as financial records, departmental reports, and consumer-contact statistics.

This information is entered into a database, which allows the departments and the SomerStat staff to track the minutiae of city operations, from the time it takes to fill a pothole to how much money is being spent on overtime pay. The SomerStat staff then analyzes the data and presents trends and statistics at regular meetings of the department heads.

These meetings are the core of the SomerStat program, Hirsch said.

"The meetings are really engaging," she said. "People are talking about core policies and priorities in the city with all the key people in the room needed to get things done.” 

The mayor traveled to Baltimore in December 2003 with key staff members and incoming department heads to witness Baltimore’s version of these meetings in a large room called the War Room.

Several department heads and officials are present at every meeting, Hirsch said. The department heads of law and personnel, the city’s finance director and auditor, the IT director, and the mayor and his aids each have tasks and sit at the table while a department head stands at the podium, or the hotseat, and fields questions about his department’s performance, she said.

Hirsch said that the questioning process is very rigorous, because it is meant to challenge the department heads to come up with new solutions to difficult problems.

“Other people are brought in when necessary,” Hirsch said. These guest speakers discuss special projects that pertain to SomerStat business.

A frequent guest is the purchasing director, said Hirsch. “One of her projects is that she’s reviewed all alarm contracts for all schools and buildings in the city.”

Hirsch said that after each SomerStat meeting, the SomerStat staff updates a database of tasks, which they use to follow up with each department.

“Every morning, Stephanie has six pieces of paper in front of her with follow-up tasks,” said Lucy Warsh, the mayor’s press secretary.

“We keep track of the next steps to come out of meetings,” Hirsch said. “In any meeting, everyone, including the mayor, has an assignment when he leaves.”

SomerStat meetings are held once or twice a month for each department, and the mayor and the department heads hold separate, smaller meeting almost every week, she said.

Before SomerStat, departments conducted regular planning meetings, and some still do. The difference SomerStat makes, said Hirsch, is that there’s very deliberate follow-up on certain issues.

History: CitiStat in Somerville?

The city of Baltimore instituted its CitiStat program in June 2000, and in its first 12 months saved taxpayers an estimated $13.2 million by streamlining the city’s bloated bureaucracy. By 2003, city officials estimated that the program had saved the city over $43 million.

City officials across the county observed Baltimore’s Mayor Martin O’Malley with envy and awe. In 2001, the Rappaport Institute for Urban Studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University arranged for officials from Boston, Cambridge and Somerville to visit Baltimore to observe CitiStat firsthand.

The trip inspired then-Somerville Mayor Dorothy A. Kelly Gay to explore options for creating SomerStat, a version of the Baltimore program in Somerville.

"Baltimore has raised the bar on municipal government management," said Gay after the Baltimore trip, according to the Rappaport Institute Web site. "In a short period of time, they have improved the efficiency of city services, reduced costs, and made City Hall more accountable to citizens,” she said.

Two years later, Curtatone made SomerStat the centerpiece of his campaign for mayor. In his inaugural speech, he pledged to immediately institute modern, state-of-the-art, cost-effective approaches to increasing responsiveness and accountability of city government to the people it serves.

Several fellows from the Rappaport Institute have worked with City Hall to design SomerStat. Last summer, Rappaport Institute Fellow Dan Newberger helped the city run the first SomerStat meetings before Curtatone appointed a permanent SomerStat staff.

Concrete Accomplishments

The mayor’s office cautions that due to the ambitious scope of SomerStat, the progress made in the early stages of the program is largely internal.

At this six-month mark, the program has accomplished many important goals, though few of these make visible changes in the day-to-day life of Somerville residents, said the mayor’s spokesperson.

In addition, making large structural changes to a large bureaucracy in the public sector is much more difficult than doing so in the private sector, he said.

“The city doesn’t have that profit incentive," said Mark Horan, the director of the executive office of communications. "It’s difficult to justify costs to the taxpayer.”
Still, SomerStat has made some concrete accomplishments in the past months, Hirsch said.

She said the most obvious example was an early discovery, made by the SomerStat staff, that the police department was spending the majority of its budget on overtime pay.

The Police Department was one of the first three city departments to be included in the SomerStat program, said Hirsch.

“It’s a good department to work with because they have a wealth of data,” she said. “There’s a lot of service data. Every time the department interacts with the public, by law there’s a record of every interaction with citizens,” she said. “There is a record of every call; if an officer investigates something, a detailed report must be written up, etc. There’s also a lot of financial data. The department also develops a crime report every two weeks, which consists of analyses of crime across the city,” she said.

When SomerStat began analyzing the police department’s financial records, it discovered problems with the department’s overtime payments, Hirsch said.

“There was too much overtime,” said Warsh. “It was taking away from better allocative resources.”

Hirsch said that the issue is complicated, with many union regulations involved, but that SomerStat is beginning to brainstorm solutions to the problem.

“We’re at the beginning stages of identifying the problem,” said Warsh. “It’s a looming goal.”

One of the possible solutions to the overtime problem is to redesign the deployment plan of officers, said Hirsch.

“Historically, it’s done by ward, which is a political-geographical designation,” she said. “A ward in West Somerville, an area with relatively little crime, would have the same number of officers deployed as Ward 1.”

“If you had flexibility of moving people between wards—for example, during the third shift, when it was slow—you’d have a different model of how to put cars where there’s crime,” Hirsch said.

Other changes made possible by SomerStat are more general shifts in attitudes at City Hall, she said.

“In this stage, I think people are more engaged,” said Hirsch. “Over time, they’ll use the process to explore and advocate for innovation.”

A sign that the program is working is when a department is driving the meeting, Hirsch said.

“That has started to happen,” she said.

Some people have responded to the new rigorous accountability standards with frustration, said Hirsch.

“Some people have said, ‘Will you just leave me alone!’ But people proudly report on what they have accomplished, and we promote all their accomplishments,” she said.

Just the Beginning

Six months from now, SomerStat will be making noticeable differences in the lives of Somerville residents.

“We need to add the remaining departments to the program,” said Hirsch. “As more tools become available, we’ll have more information on services, which will open up whole new questions.”

A work order system will be instituted in the DPW within the next month, Horan said. “Once that happens, work orders will be tracked, and the results will turn out better,” he said.

Horan also said that they are developing a mapping system that will allow data from the SomerStat database to be graphed over a map of the city. This system will show how services are being rendered geographically, and will show SomerStat staff news ways of streamlining city services, he said.

The Rappaport Institute is coordinating a related project that will operate in conjunction with SomerStat, Hirsch said.

"The project that will aid SomerStat by bringing students from a University accounting class to convert the city’s current line-item budget to an activity-based budget," she said.

The project will help both SomerStat and the Mayor, she said. “It will itemize all the city’s activities and allocate costs to activity costs, which will help us make decisions such as "Is it worth it?’"

Curtatone said he stresses that this financial aspect of SomerStat was very important. "You want to make sure you can operate with the biggest bang for your buck,” he said.

The 311 system, a phone number that will allow Somerville residents to report and track requests for city services, will be implemented this summer.

“The hardware needs to be configured, a system of answering the phone must be set up,” said Hirsch.

Hirsch said that 311 will be a work request database that monitors the completion status of every project in the city, from the DPW filling a pothole to the IT department fixing a computer in City Hall.

The 311 database will also be accessible from the city’s newly redesigned website, allowing Somerville residents to submit works requests online.
In the long term, the mayor plans to extend SomerStat to all aspects of city government.

“Eventually, the school system will be a part of the program,” he said.