The Clark County Department of Community Development is responsible for most of county’s the civil regulations – this includes long range planning; the review of all residential, commercial and industrial development projects; building and fire marshal inspections; code enforcement; and even animal control. The department 120 employees undertakes over 100,000 separate action annually with a budget of around $10 million.
I started work as the department director in January 1999 – the same time as the newly elected county auditor Greg Kimsey. Greg had and interest in doing performance auditing of county agencies – so I asked him to make my department his first performance audit.
My reasons were very simple:
So what is a performance audit? It is a management tool that uses an independent and systematic examination of an organization’s performance that seeks to improve the organizations accountability and efficiency. In this case the independently elected county auditor managed the contract and made the final recommendations.
In February of 2000, the county auditor hired the firm of Citygate Associates – at a cost of $216,000 – to do the audit. Although this sounds like a lot of money – and it is – it is less than _ of 1 percent of my budget over 5 years. And 5 years is probably about how much time goes by before you need to do one again.
In order to identify the basic issues and concerns, the audit team conducted stakeholder interviews, and they did both an employee survey and a customer survey. They also did a detailed analysis of our financial, management and regulatory processes. For several months they would come and go talking to staff about how we did our work.
Findings
The customer surveys confirmed what I believed. People believed my employees were talented and hardworking – in fact they gave a report card grade of "B" for courtesy. Unfortunately, we got several "Ds", the worst being a "D-" for not understanding the private sector. We got a "C-" for our overall performance.
By the way, a lot of people asked my about employee morale after this information was in the local newspapers. They asked, "How are your employees dealing with this?" Going through an audit is like going to the dentist to get your teeth cleaned. No one likes to do it. But you know you are healthier because of it. The audit gave my employees the chance to be proactive – and stop being defensive. We now had a plan of action. In fact, we started implementing the audit recommendations before the audit was over. The auditors complained to the county commissioners – with tongue in cheek – that we moved too quickly that it was hard to keep up with us.
And they were right – we went after to primary offenses:
- No one calls me back. Every person in the department – including me – starting keeping phone logs. We set a target and achieved a 24-hour call back rate of 95%.
- You lost my file. We established a document control system and literally closed off the non-public areas of the building in order to force all documents to come over the counter and be tracked. Our administrative assistants suggested they be issued paddles for staff offenders, but I decided against corporal punishment. I let folks know that losing files is as bad as chronic absenteeism and is a personnel issue.
- What going on with my application? We hired a full-time ombudsman (or in this case ombuds-woman) to be an advocate for the customer. She is equal in status to every division manager and reports directly to me. If someone is needlessly holding up a permit, she has the authority to move it.
Recommendations
The audit was completed and presented to the Board of County Commissioners in December 2000. There were 44 specific recommendations. The basic recommendations were:
- Develop useful performance measures.
- Expand our website to provide more information, forms and process information.
- Make pre-application conferences optional and free.
- Create a less onerous "fully complete" process.
- Institute a case management system for permit processing.
- Make "unanticipated customer service" a reality.
- Use an administrative process with staff approvals, and no hearings examiner.
- Tradeoff is to require applicants to make presentations to neighborhood associations.
- Reduce engineering review cycle times down to 3, or hold "all-hands" meetings.
- Reinforce the chain of command and take the politics out of permitting.
- Increase the staff knowledge about private sector practices and needs.
- Do a major rewrite of the county development.
- Establish standards for the quality of the Building Plan Review & turnaround time.
- Increase staffing in Building Inspection to improve quality of our inspections.
- Invest more customer service training into our front-line permits center staff.
- Invest in technology for our field inspectors.
- Improve our cost-accounting so that we could tell what it cost to process any permit.
- Reduce the number of task forces and sunset the rest.
- Finally, we had the audit time come back in 6 months to monitor our progress.
Implementation
We are doing a February 2001 worksession with the county commissioners to explain when and where each recommendation would happen.
The department is developing a 5-year Strategic Plan that will incorporate all the audit recommendations.
We will come back to the board with a special supplemental budget request.
Conclusion
The keys to a successful performance audit are:
- Understanding that you need to invest in evaluating your performance. Continuous improvement has a cost, but the returns are worth it.
- Hire a firm that knows what they are doing – and more important – knows what you are doing. Citygate did a good job because they built a team of people who understood the processes and challenges of my department.
- Make it a collaborative effort. A hostile audit only results in hostile recommendations – like firing top management. Realize that an occasional self-evaluation is a good thing – in your life and your job.
Author and Copyright Information
Copyright 2001 by Author
Richard H. Carson is a practicing planner of some 30 years. He currently manages 120 employees as director of the Clark County Department of Community Development in Vancouver, Washington. He is a past director of planning for Metro (the Portland, Oregon regional government which represents 1 million people). He is also a past editor of the Oregon Planners' Journal and currently maintains the APA national website's Planning Editors Internet List. He is also an elected board member for the APA Oregon Chapter. He can be contacted via e-mail at rich.carson@co.clark.wa.us.
