2016 Q2 ISSUE COSTTREE CAPTURE. 11
To arrive at contextually rich data, we must first have both agencies’ expenses, then have their true costs (direct plus administrative) provided by the cost allocation plans. But even these true costs are not enough. You can’t just look at the cost of one county’s Sheriff department at $10 million while the next county over is $30 million and say the first is more efficient. If you were able to compare their true costs to put one officer on the street you would know that in both counties it costs $82K per officer; one agency just has more officers than the neighboring county. CONTEXT must be added! Our hope is that our country’s entrepreneurs and public leaders see the value this can provide in informed decision making and increased public participation in government processes.
It is our responsibility to continue on and to preserve our system of government as envisioned by the founding fathers. Citizens and governments must both participate, taking advantage of the tools we have available and developing new ones to tell us more. Together we will steer our society in the direction chosen by the people. We can keep improving and must strive to.
Open government
is critical to an informed public, and an informed public is critical
to democracy.
– Judith Zaffirini
IMPORTANCE OF TRANSPARENCY
service the disadvantaged, and repair the county. He would then have been able to rate the efficiencies of his county services against others to decide on what needed to change. His choices at the polls could have been very different.
He would have seen that the administration of the county was actually run very efficiently. Maybe the Parks department, Health and Human Services, and Public Works department also operate efficiently and effectively, but the Sheriff’s department is too expensive when compared to surrounding jurisdictions and the level of service provided.
Now, when going to the polls, this citizen is truly educated. His votes are cast to approve a road repair tax measure, knowing that the money will be well used, and to keep his county supervisor, knowing that the county’s administration is run efficiently; but he votes down the incumbent Sherriff.
More and more tools are becoming available that governments can use to share their financial data. The example of a benchmarking tool that compares the efficiencies of governmental operations is not something that we have seen in use yet. This conceptual tool would make financial data more actionable by letting viewers compare costs for services at a unit level. You can’t just look at one sheriff department’s total expenditures against another’s, context needs to be added. Comparing the true cost of a service on a unit basis, i.e., cost per paycheck, cost per officer on the street, or cost of maintenance per vehicle, are more relevant to a stakeholder than one agency’s total costs versus another’s.