Municipal Benchmarking     

Guest Column

Municipal Benchmarking

By Carl F. Valente, Town Manager, Lexington

 Following its success in the private sector, there has been a fair amount of interest in recent years in the concept of municipal benchmarking, a technique that generally refers to comparing the cost and service levels of government from one town to another. The Lexington Minuteman has been running a weekly report, Municipal Benchmarking: Lexington at-a-Glance, based on the information provided by a relatively new Waltham company called Municipal Benchmarking, LLC. I have cautioned the Selectmen and other Town officials in making any definitive conclusions based on this specific data.

  The data used by this firm is the same data that all municipalities submit to various State agencies and is available from these agencies on-line, free of charge to anyone with Internet access. While the data submitted may be subject to some basic quality control review, it is often not analyzed to determine if it was reported by all cities and towns on a reasonably comparable basis. Thus, when it is used for benchmarking purposes, it may lead to misleading conclusions about the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a community’s municipal services.

  Lexington, for example, includes the costs of its joint police and fire dispatch center in the police budget while other communities without joint dispatch operations typically include their dispatching costs as part of both the police and fire budgets since there are dispatchers in each location. Lexington includes most building maintenance costs in its DPW budget. In other communities where I have worked these costs were shown in individual departmental budgets. No one approach is correct. The different approaches, however, makes for vastly different spending per capita for the police, fire and public works departments and thus, faulty town-to-town comparisons.

  As an alternative to broad brush benchmarking, Lexington has taken a more in depth, substantive approach. The first priority of the Board of Selectmen is to provide a level of service that the community desires. Town officials then examine how to deliver these services so that they are of high quality and reasonable cost. By measuring service delivery performance using various measures, we strive to continuously improve the delivery of services. A full listing of these measures can be found in the Town’s Budget and Financing Plan which is available on the Town of Lexington website.

  It may be helpful to provide examples of the measures Lexington has used to improve its service delivery in recent years.

  In response to an increasing number and complexity of emergency medical service calls, the Fire Department upgraded its services from the EMT level to Paramedic. Paramedics have the training to provide a much higher level of medical attention. This has become particularly important as our population has become older and patient stays at hospitals shorter, leading to more calls for the ambulance. For the past five years, 99 percent of service recipients rate our paramedic service with a good or better rating. We also know that 90 percent of all calls for service are responded to in four minutes. The national standard is a six-minute response for 80 percent of medical calls.

At the Library one measure we look at is the circulation per staff person to determine how efficiently we staff the Library. By this measure, Lexington library staff process 18,459 items per year for each full time equivalent employee. The average for the 10 libraries in the region is 15,296 items.

  In looking at our youth athletic programs, the Town found that athletic fields were frequently in poor condition due to overuse or not available to teams due to weather conditions. By building synthetic turf fields at Lincoln Park we increased our customer satisfaction levels from 67 percent to 98 percent while decreasing our maintenance costs. In this case, Town officials determined that by investing in capital improvements by way of synthetic turf fields the Town could provide higher customer satisfaction and lower operating costs.

  Our Highway Department found that potholes were an area of constant complaints by residents. The cold, wet New England weather made it difficult to make long lasting pothole repairs in the winter months. Highway staff was spending a considerable amount of time and material for a product, cold asphalt mix, which was not long lasting, thereby requiring frequent repairs to the same pothole. In response, the Town purchased a specific piece of equipment for repairing potholes. It uses only two staff, compared to the four staff previously devoted to this work. The potholes repaired with this equipment during the winter months are found to last as long as the work done during the summer months when hot asphalt mix is available.

  The Water Department has an ongoing program to monitor the quality of the water it delivers to every home and business in town. While residents may take clean safe drinking water for granted, our Water Department was recently recognized by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection for being in the top 5 percent of water systems in Massachusetts.

  The list can go on and on, and our benchmarking work will be ongoing, but hopefully these few examples will give you a better indication of what true benchmarking and performance measurement is all about.