Is city spending wisely? S.F. lacks data

Proposition C passed, creating a new tax on San Francisco’s corporations to fund a new homelessness services strategy. Lost in the verbal battle between the billionaires — are you for or against homeless, is the tax fairly or unfairly applied — were the complex realities of addressing homelessness and of keeping city programs, workers, contractors and elected officials accountable.

Accountability is hard to come by in San Francisco’s city government because of how little it measures.

We collect and report very little data on what works and what doesn’t. We spend billions of dollars, but almost none of it goes to understanding whether programs are effective or in trying to understand whether we are actually getting the most from each dollar we spend. We spend more money on homelessness programs per capita than almost any other city in the country, yet programs face almost no scrutiny around whether they are pulling their weight in the use of public dollars.

And yet the first obligation of local government is to work — to fill the potholes, to police the streets, and to support the homeless. What data we do have suggest that San Francisco fails at all three and much more. We need to use data better, and demand more of it if we’re to improve how the city does business.

Cities across the country have realized that they owe their citizens good operations where the government can show that it does the most good possible with every dollar spent. Baltimore has its CitiStat program, Philadelphia has Phillystat, New York City has the Office of Operations and the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, Chicago has SmartData, New Orleans has the Office of Performance and Accountability. But not here.

What do these programs have in common? They define the hundreds of goals the city is trying to reach across all its programs, they measure performance around those goals (down to the contract and worker level), and they hold managers, workers, not-for-profits and elected officials publicly accountable against those goals.

We need to address the abject failures of management in San Francisco, where year after year politicians highlight the subtle differences in their “blue” values while almost no one focuses on actually running the city well.

Doing that requires having conversations about the effectiveness of community programs, not-for-profit partners and city workers. It requires objectively analyzing elected officials’ pet projects and pet ideas. It requires more than just saying the word “accountability” — it requires holding people accountable. None of this happens in San Francisco; it’s thought of as just too difficult, and we continue on with one of the worstrun, least-effective and embarrassing city governments in the country.

I’ve seen the difference in how effective, efficient and well-run cities, counties and programs across the state can be compared to those unwilling to make better and smarter decisions through data.

The city of San Francisco needs to go much further than some additional cleanup crews, walking tours or a single tax that goes directly toward homelessness services. We need to reconstitute the city government so that every program is data-driven, every office is evaluated, every department and its leader is held accountable, and every mayor can be judged transparently on their performance. We certainly have the money to do it — we just need the political will.