ROLE 5: Assist Elected Officials or Citizens
Practice 5b. Report performance: Produce and issue external periodic performance reports.
San Francisco, California, City Services Auditor
The City Services Auditor (CSA) of the City and County of San Francisco issues several public performance reports. The City Survey, a city-wide resident survey, is described under Practice 3b.Collect Data. This example focuses on a user survey of San Francisco parks, and how it relates to separate CSA reports on the CSA’s observations of park conditions. In the 2007 User Survey Report (see “Reports” below), the CSA pointed out interesting relationships between what park users said and what the CSA found when auditing park maintenance conditions.
The CSA is mandated to develop standards for parks, streets, and sidewalk maintenance, and to issue an annual performance report against the standards. The 2006-07 park maintenance performance report is based on standards developed in FY 2004-05. The standards cover 14 extensive features. (See a summary in Exhibit 1 in the Introduction to the 2006-07 Annual Report in “Reports” below. See “Tools” for more details on parks standards.) Each element has a pass/fail standard; some use a threshold standard. For example, the restroom cleanliness threshold is no more than three pieces of litter found on the ground, wall, or ceiling. Inspections against standards are carried out twice by park staff and once by CSA staff each year. CSA uses two methods for data analysis: (1) averaging the percent of standards met for each element for each park, and (2) converting percentages to grades.
CSA conducted a Park Users Survey in selected City parks between April and May 2007 to characterize park users and to measure direct perceptions about their park experience. The survey also reports on park usage patterns, which are useful to park managers for resource deployment decisions. Twenty-nine parks were visited and 2,647 park users were approached and asked to fill out a questionnaire. A total of 1,363 completed responses were received by the CSA’s Office.
The supporting analyses, in addition to the actual survey results, were issued to the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, the general manager of the Recreation and Park Department; it was also posted on the CSA’s website for the public. Findings within the resident survey report have proven to both validate and, in some cases, indicate variance with findings from the mandated assessment of park maintenance against standards. As the CSA described in the Park User Survey Report, “When a park passed the city’s park maintenance standards for a specific feature, the survey shows that visitors are more likely to choose this park because of this feature. And a higher inspection score usually matched with higher ratings by the survey respondents.”
At the specific level, the two assessments showed some divergence. For example, if, in the performance assessment, a park failed a maintenance standard, such as cleanliness, survey participants did not necessarily see the need for improvement. CSA suggests in the Survey Report that the difference may be based on the public being more tolerant of some subpar conditions than allowed by the city’s strict maintenance standards, such as the zero tolerance standard for graffiti.
Reports:
Annual Report on Parks, Streets, and Sidewalk Maintenance 2006-2007. (PDF, 1.7 MB)
Park User Survey (PDF, 1.7 MB)
Tools:
Park Maintenance Standards Manual and Evaluation Form (PDF, 2 MB)
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