by Sam Allis of The Boston Globe
9/29/2002 This can be found in the Boston Globe archives at www.bostonglobe.com

BALTIMORE - Martin O'Malley looks at a chart up on the screen. Daily average housing inspections for the past two weeks against the previous two-week reporting period.

"Who's in charge of District 5?" he asks, noting the most inspections were performed there in the latest summary. District 9 is the lowest. "Who's in charge there? Does he know he's the lowest in the city?"

It's Friday morning, and the 40-year-old mayor is holding his customary Star Chamber proceedings with two of his department heads. "I just finished puking," jokes one department staffer on his way out of the men's room before they start.

Welcome to Citistat. You won't find anything like it in Boston. O'Malley dreamed it up after being elected in 1999 and started it in June 2000. A dozen major department heads face third-degree scrutiny every two weeks by O'Malley's senior staff and, time permitting, the mayor himself. Data are gathered on everything from overtime and sick leave to abandoned vehicles and dead animal pickup, and then sent via computer to Matt Gallagher's shop for each session.

Gallagher is O'Malley's 30-year-old Citi stat czar who digests it all with his staff and then, with the chief of staff, Michael Enright, and members of O'Malley's Cabinet, presides over the sessions. This group offers brisk compliments and the occasional Baltimore Ravens ticket to worthy performers, but, more often, they probe problems the way Laurence Olivier examined Dustin Hoffman's cavities in "Marathon Man."

("Let me get this right," interrupts Gallagher as a Housing & Community Development manager talks about housing inspections. "You've got almost 500 people. There are 115 inspectors and 41 people to fix the problems?")

What Citistat does is create an immediate timeline and an unassailable paper trail - complete with maps, charts, and photographs - of performance, punctuated in two-week spans. What it gives the people who run Baltimore is astonishing knowledge of their city. There is an immediacy to the program that no monthly or quarterly review in other cities can match.

"You do the same things every day, but it doesn't have the same level of intensity or continuity of scrutiny," says Chip Iglesias, chief of staff to Miami City Manager Carlos Gimenez, after an observation trip to Baltimore.

The fear factor alone makes it a different experience. "Any time the chief executive is in a room, the format becomes more effective," notes Lisa Signori, budget director for Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who flew to Baltimore last year to see Citistat in action.

O'Malley lifted the Citistat idea from the program pioneered by the late Jack Maple in the New York City Police Department that uses crime data to target the worst areas on a weekly basis. It worked wonders there and has been aped by police departments around the country. O'Malley simply extended the process across his administration.

Citistat now has a marquee value. Mayors and urbanistas from across the country visit Baltimore, and most return home believers. Pittsburgh has created its own program. Miami is funding one in its new fiscal year. Somerville Mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay is in the early stages of building a version called "Somerstat."

Not Boston. "The question becomes, does all government need that level of micromanagement?" says Signori. "There was a lack of quality information at the mayor's office in Baltimore prior to this program. That is not the case here."

True, but Boston can do a lot better. The operative question is, how badly does the Menino administration want to know more about its city on a timely basis?

If Boston has not embraced Citistat, it is edging toward it. Last week, personnel in all city departments began training to use a new computerized central database into which will flow the most important information isolated from the volume of complaints or service requests that pour into the city hot line - 617-635-4500. (Baltimore uses 311 for Citi stat - much easier to remember.)

Coupled with this, Boston will initiate Citistat-like department reviews later this fall with the mayor and his senior staff. At the moment, says Signori, reviews at that level occur only during the budget process that begins early each year and continues into the spring.

Citistat stalwarts maintain you've got to buy the whole idea to reap its benefits. "You can get a little better information by adopting a few of these things, sure," says Charles Euchner, executive director of Harvard's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. "But for one half of government to know what the other half is doing, this is absolutely essential."

There is a downside to Citistat - the colossal amount of time it requires. The program is, as structured, relentless, inflexible, and unmodulated. Half a dozen department heads each eat a couple of hours of grilling every week and a few hours more collecting and absorbing data to prepare for the experience. Their subordinates, in turn, must learn to retrieve and synthesize the right data. Senior staff are fixtures at the sessions and must do their homework in advance.

But let's get real. O'Malley's Citistat is a template for any city government out to learn what it doesn't know about its community and why it doesn't know it. In the long run, whether this process occurs on a biweekly or monthly basis is less important than the commitment to a new level of accountability. It began in Baltimore.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company