Public Administration Quarterly

Local governments are responding to growing pressures to increase transparency and citizen engagement, particularly in light of the fiscal stress created by the Great Recession. Historically, the budget process has been a target for these efforts, generally through public hearings and requirements for publicly available budget documents. However, there is growing interest in moving past information sharing to more dynamic and interactive engagement. A review of citizen engagement literature reveals the diverse ways in which local governments and citizens engage with each other. It also reveals that most studies are presented primarily from the perspective of the local government. This article responds by presenting a case study on Greensboro, North Carolina, where a citizen-led effort successfully introduced participatory budgeting (PB). In October 2014, Greensboro passed a resolution in which it committed $500,000 annually to PB, allowing citizens to develop and vote on budget proposals. The research presented here is a first step toward understanding efforts to increase transparency and engagement from a citizen perspective, and it highlights some of the unique challenges that citizens face when they take on such an initiative.

Performance management, the use of performance information in strategic daily decision making, has not infiltrated local governments to the same degree as state or federal agencies. This article uses the capacity/performance paradigm as a framework to build a theoretical synthesis of the obstacles to local government use of performance management. It identifies and elucidates a series of challenges local governments face in successfully implementing performance-based management approaches. Among the obstacles identified are: insufficient administrative capacity, limited fiscal resources, insufficient economies of scale, absence of comparable entities for benchmarking, inadequate use of strategic planning, complex implementation environments (intergovernmental, intersectoral, cooperative, and collaborative), strings attached to state or federal grant awards, the illusion of control created by proximity to decision makers and citizens, task simplicity, and the cacophony of reform expectations (strategic planning, program evaluation, performance measurement and management, evidence-based practice). Because of these challenges, these small local governments are less likely to encounter demands for performance information, or to develop an a priori appreciation for its value to day-to-day administration. The essay concludes with a look at what can be done to inspire increased attention to performance in local government administration.

Public officials in local communities are regularly concerned with the level of their property tax burden compared to that of neighboring jurisdictions. Making meaningful comparisons of property taxes across communities is challenging, however, because differences in the economic characteristics of towns and cities play a key role in how the property tax is locally administered. This paper presents the results of a collaborative property tax benchmarking initiative undertaken by a group of municipalities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. Property tax practices were compared across jurisdictions to develop a detailed depiction of tax differentials across the region.

Cost accounting has been used in public organizations for over 100 years. In spite of cost accounting's history, there remains little empirical research of multiple organizations use of cost accounting at the department or service level. This paper uses the data from large U.S. cities’ central cost accounting plans, budgets, Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, and common measures of transaction costs to examine the influence of economic transaction costs on the measurement of indirect cost measurement for services. The results indicate that indirect cost measurement is limited by the transaction costs that arise from asset specificity at the service level but measurement uncertainty is related with a higher likelihood of observing an indirect cost driver. Transaction cost theory may help explain the notable underutilization of cost accounting in public organizations, but it also highlights the need for understanding the different dimensions of transaction costs for cost accounting and performance measurement.

The North Carolina Benchmarking Project has been in existence for approximately 20 years, functioning under the benchmarking category of comparison of performance statistics as benchmarks. This form of benchmarking, however, is diagnostic, requiring subsequent analytical steps before local officials can actually use comparative data for improving service delivery. This article presents lessons learned from the North Carolina Benchmarking Project to advance our understanding of why local governments participate in these types of benchmarking initiatives and how they review and make decisions regarding the comparative data. They include that local governments participate more for the purpose of greater internal accountability rather than performance management and that local governments use benchmarking data both for excellence and satisficing when responding to departmental rankings.

Existing research on local government adoption of age friendly policies has been limited in its theoretical approach and empirical analysis. While these findings suggest an important role for local government in this issue, this paper asserts that a single model does not offer a full explanation. Therefore, the following paper assess different conceptual models for local government adoption of policies deemed important for older adults to remain independent in their community. This paper argues that responsiveness, multi-level governance, and public entrepreneurship theories offer a fuller explanation for local government policy decision-making. Some local governments throughout the nation are already showing an increase in support for the adoption of age-friendly policies and are designing initiatives that address fundamental policies like housing, transportation, and other services. This research examines evidence from a 20-question survey designed to probe general features of local governments and specific community characteristics to determine the extent to which local governments adopt relative policies and implement programs. The authors find support for a multi-model explanation.

This research examines the role of the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ (OIRA) involvement in federal rulemaking. More specifically, this paper presents interview data from agency rule-writers across three public land agencies, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Park Service (NPS), and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), along with OIRA staff to better understand OIRA's role in rulemaking processes. Through semi-structured interviews, this paper provides evidence to support that negative perceptions and relationships between OIRA and public land agencies only lengthens and strains rule development. The results suggest important lessons from agency personnel and OIRA staff about how future rulemakings can be strengthened by working on regulatory relationships through new forms of uniformity and consistency.