Putting Off Talks A Poor Beginning
Mayor John Talbott has a point when he says - and he’s said it often - that voters are unlikely to support taxes for street repairs and other needed municipal services until they’re convinced that current tax dollars are well-spent.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Talbott’s proposal to create a city auditor’s position should be embraced precisely as he’s laid it out. But it does suggest that the majority of the Spokane City Council should show more interest in an auditing system that evaluates government’s efficiency and effectiveness.
At a retreat last month, the council agreed to examine the concept but not before August or September. The council had trouble just settling on a time to talk about talking about it.
Why the reluctance? It’s true that some council members have a generally gritty relationship with the mayor from whom the idea came, but last fall’s rancorous campaign ought to be behind us. There is important city business to do.
Given how regularly the council has to stretch financial resources to cover essential public services, one would think it would be eager for a system designed to facilitate that purpose.
Yet rather than put the issue high on their priority list, council members have deferred it until late summer or early fall, if not later.
The larger puzzle is why the city of Spokane doesn’t already have such a system. Many other cities and counties around the country do. They began deciding in the ‘60s that conventional financial audits, while they may work fine for private businesses that primarily want to know if they’re making a profit, are inadequate for government purposes. Local governments need more qualitative information, such as whether they’re delivering the services citizens want and if they’re doing so as efficiently as possible.
That kind of information comes from performance auditing which has saved tax dollars and improved services in such places as Portland, Seattle and Denver.
The most serious attention the idea has received here came about five years ago when an elected board of freeholders was trying to redesign local government for Spokane County. An auditor was a key element of the group’s proposal. The overall charter the freeholders drafted lost at the polls, but even many of its critics liked the audit provision.
Portland’s director of audits, Richard Tracy, says the system in that progressive city has paid for itself several times over. It was tested there in a pilot program in 1983 and impressed voters so much that they overwhelmingly passed a charter amendment making it permanent two years later.
No wonder. The performance audit structure gives citizens a comforting measure of accountability from their government. And inside City Hall, it’s a resource for department officials trying to improve their operations.
Unfortunately, public trust is not as high in Spokane as in Portland. Credibility won’t blossom overnight.
It will take patience on everyone’s part to design an appropriate system - one that assures professionalism and independence - and to give it time to work.
Sooner or later, virtually every difficult issue that confronts the council comes down to money. A good performance auditing system won’t eliminate those difficulties, but it will ease them. And if it’s implemented well, it will give Spokane a badly needed boost in public trust.