Speaking of government report cards for states (see previous post), Virginia could use a good system for rating its local governments. As it happens, the Virginia Tea Party Federation is mobilizing to grade Virginia local governments on the basis of 20 to 30 key performance indicators on fiscal health and quality of government services.
The data will be extracted whenever possible from authoritative sources such as local Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs), Mark Dougherty, chairman federation’s Local Government Committee (LGC), said yesterday at the Tuesday Morning Group gathering of conservative and libertarian activists. The LCC hopes to release results in late 2017 after fiscal 201 data becomes available this fall.
The goal is to educate citizens and local government officials and to highlight opportunities to improve governance, Dougherty said. CAFRs run 200 to 300 pages long, and they are difficult for ordinary citizens to plow through. The Tea Party is looking for volunteers willing to compile data for each of Virginia’s 95 counties and 38 cities.
It will be a challenge to create a “fair” rating system, acknowledged Daugherty, who hails from Staunton. Virginia localities vary in size and needs from sparsely populated Highland County, with a $7 million annual budget, to massive Fairfax County with more than a million people and a $7 billion annual budget.
The Tea Party report cards will rate Virginia’s localities on the basis of standard measures and ratios that apply to all, but may adjust for a locality’s unique attributes. Bonus points might be awarded, say, to a county that posts its checkbooks online for public inspection, while penalties might be levied for self-declared sanctuary cities (on the grounds that the presence of illegal aliens runs up local government costs).
As an example of the kind of analysis he hopes citizens will be able to conduct, Daugherty cited Henrico County, where 20 fire-and-rescue stations serve 330,000 residents. Of its 47,000 calls last year, only 825 responded to fires. Clearly, the vast majority were non-fire related. Before Henrico builds another fire station, might it be feasible to have a light fire/rescue vehicle to patrol areas of the county that generate the most calls?
Another example: City of Richmond public schools have between 2,000 and 3,000 students in each of its elementary school grades but only about 1,200 in its high school grades. Are kids dropping out? Are parents keeping their kids in elementary school but then yanking them out of middle school, either to put them in private school or to move out of the county? That would be helpful to know in formulating educational policy. Another question arising from the data is whether the school has adjusted its infrastructure — number and size of public school facilities — to the lower number of high school students.
Daugherty pointed to Goochland County’s “Strategic Plan Report Card,” with five goals and 23 measures, as a potential template for what the Tea Party has in mind. Goochland not only looks at its property tax rate but tracks the ratio of commercial to residential property, new taxable commercial investment, and new taxable investment within its eastern growth management area. The report also measures financial liquidity, the debt-to-expenditure ratio, patrol area covered per deputy, emergency response times, and annual government employee turnover, among other indicators.
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