The CitiStat Method of Evaluating Municipal Services: A Cross-City Analysis

Municipalities face scrutiny from citizens regarding the delivery of services.  Traditional measures of service delivery (which vary between city departments) include, for example, number of arrests (Police Departments), response times to fires (Fire), citizen use of parks (Parks and Recreation), and the successful maintenance of streets and solid waste collection (Public Works).  No uniform measure of successful service delivery and/or possible efficiency gains from analyzing these delivered services currently exists.  CitiStat is a recently developed statistics-based approach to service delivery analysis adopted by a number of cities in both the U.S. and Europe.  The method is designed to analyze both the manner in which city services are delivered and the relative efficiency gains that might result – and possibly be implemented – as a result of this analysis. 

Cities which have adopted CitiStat as a diagnostic tool use the CitiStat process to assess and evaluate both the provision of municipal services and their efficient deployment.  In this paper we analyze the impact and effectiveness of the CitiStat process on the delivery of municipal services by analyzing outcomes measures used by city governments to assess the effectiveness of services offered by local municipalities.  These measures include, for example, facility use, attendance at city-sponsored events, government-sponsored programs designed to impact variously defined demographic groups (pre-teens, teenagers, adults, senior citizens, etc.), and revenues generated by municipal services and programs.    For comparison purposes, a control group of cities not using CitiStat will be identified and benchmarked to CitiStat cities using a variety of measures, including efficient provision of services, efficacy and opacity of reporting processes, and citizen satisfaction of municipal services.  City-by-city benchmarking is expected to identify methods which non-CitiStat municipalities might use to emulate the successes of cities using the CitiStat process to evaluate performance.

The present paper is exploratory in nature, and is intended to provide an overview of ongoing CitiStat programs and suggest an approach to evaluating these programs within an economic framework.