Small Cities Doing Big Things with E-Government, Marketing
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Small U.S. cities showed off Monday how they're using online portals and social media for everything from offering residents deep dives into how the cities raise and spend money to marketing big-time sporting events. But they acknowledged being upstaged a bit at the annual conference of the International City/County Management Association by a presentation about how officials in the German city of Essen, with a population of about 500,000 and an accumulated deficit of about $2.8 billion, are continuously soliciting ideas online on how to increase revenue and decrease spending and doing interactive polling about budgeting.
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"Local government is still ranking very high” in public confidence in the U.S., as the federal government and political parties have sunk, said Bob Woods, management systems director of Albany, Ore. Albany’s Web strategy is based on the principle that engagement, understanding and transparency are the foundations of trust in government, Woods said. He recommended that cities submit their online work to grading on the Sunshine Review wiki.
A major feature of Albany’s efforts, called Where Does My Money Go?, started this year, Woods said. It displays with pie charts how the proceeds of particular resources are spent, and users can bring that down to a personal level by seeing, for instance, how the property taxes from a specified address are allocated, he said. Woods said a feature called the Dashboard allows searches to bring up detail on strings of city checks or payments to specific contracts. Figures can be downloaded as PDFs or Excel files. The service brought some “wows” from the audience of local administrators.
Any city department or fund can be searched to check amounts budgeted and spent by category, or actual versus projected service calls, Woods said. Performance can be charted against comparable cities’ and national benchmarks, he said. “We're measuring apples to apples -- as close as you can get to it,” Woods said. Lately each city agency has been required under the strategic plan to choose a goal, and progress is measured online, he said. All of Albany’s online information services have been provided using city workers and software on hand, Woods said.
Glendale, Ariz., next to Phoenix, has three websites for different audiences and purposes, said Julie Watters, acting deputy communications director. One is for general tourism and another, called Glendale’s Got Game, specializes in promoting major-league sports events and other recreation. The city is home to the National Football League’s Cardinals, the National Hockey League’s Coyotes and spring training for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox baseball teams. Glendale is big on online advertising for championship events like the 2008 Super Bowl between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, when it reached 1.8 million Internet viewers from the Northeast, and for the coming college football Fiesta Bowl and BCS Championship Game, Watters said.
City newsletters, tax-payment mechanisms and now detailed budgeting information are online, Watters said. There’s a large, searchable library of informational videos, she said. The government also makes heavy use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, Watters said. The city has had to put limits on which employees can run these activities and on posted comments, she said. “Some people think” social media are “a fad” that’s “going to go away,” Watters said. “Our thought is, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger.”
Essen is just one of 140 cities that have developed “participatory budgeting,” said Hanspeter Knirsch, a government-administration consultant. Most use the Internet, Knirsch said. In Cologne, 85 percent of citizen participation takes place online, he said. A key to Essen’s budgeting platform is giving participants immediate, graphical feedback about their votes and how they fit into both citywide polling and their own participation records, Knirsch said. “It’s motivating” and makes taking part feel less anonymous, he said.
Knirsch acknowledged that the site could be made “entertaining, more interesting.” He said he would take up with Essen’s treasurer the suggestion made in a conference keynote to make use of elements like those in electronic games.
Woods and Watters said they were impressed by Essen’s efforts and they would look into upgrading their cities’ online efforts with participatory budgeting features. “We need to get something like that integrated,” Woods said.