Mayor gives city staff an A-

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

City staff presented a report card for the internal workings of City Hall at yesterday’s Santa Barbara City Council meeting, pointing out performance highlights and areas for improvement across city departments.
Dubbed by city employees as the Paradise Performance Program, or P3, the program promotes long-term planning, leadership development and organization. Yesterday’s status report provided a glimpse into how individual departments performed over the last 12 months.

“I’d give us an ‘A,’” Mayor Marty Blum said. “But there’s always room for improvement, so probably an ‘A-minus.’”
City Administrator Jim Armstrong delivered the report, which he described as focusing on the “meat and potatoes” of city operations.
“It doesn’t make headlines, but it’s key to the day-to-day operations of the city,” Armstrong said.
Items highlighted in the presentation included a 44 percent reduction of lost hours due to injuries since 2004, a reduction in city vehicle collisions and an increase in the percentage of employee evaluations completed on time — 87 percent, up from 79 percent last year.
Armstrong also pointed out that city staff doubled the amount of sidewalk repairs performed, planted 311 trees and removed 92.5 percent of graffiti from public property within three business days. The fire department also received the highest level of state certification for its urban search and rescue task force.
It wasn’t a completely glowing report, however, as city staff noted in two pages of examples of unachieved performance objectives. The failure to wire the Faulkner Gallery for video and audio in order to televise events and meetings held at that location appeared on those pages, along with DUI traffic collisions exceeding the three-year average by nine percent, while the goal was to keep that figure level.
Public Works staff also failed to achieve the objective of meeting 91 percent of response dates for building permits, meeting only 70 percent of those timelines. Only 70 percent of permit holders rated maintenance and cleanliness at satisfactory or better for the Municipal Tennis facility.
“Usually we’d have to ask for all the things that didn’t work,” Mayor Blum said. “So that was good to see. It’s real transparent that way.”
Also included in the status report was a comparison of Santa Barbara to five other cities similar in terms of population and demographics. Santa Barbara’s reliance on tourism stood out for Councilmember Brian Barnwell.
“If you look at the total revenue, over half of it is what you could call tourist-related,” Barnwell said. “...A lot of our success comes from that revenue stream.”
Santa Barbara also ranked high in number of sworn police officers per 1,000 residents, second only to Santa Monica, and emerged as third in Parks and Recreation expenditures.
“I was real interested in seeing the data from the other cities,” Mayor Blum said. “I thought we held up really well.”
Councilmember Grant House urged city staff to work with other cities that show excellence in specific areas to determine other areas for improvement in the future, but described the report card as a “great management tool.” Councilmember Helene Schneider also asked for city staff to take a look at key changes or trends that have emerged since the inception of the program in 2002.