Fresh Eyes Take a Look at a City’s Bottom Line : Burbank: At the invitation of desperate officials, two citizens panels are proposing ways to govern more efficiently in the face of likely budget cuts.

The closest the common citizen usually comes to shaping local government is voting a couple of times a year.

Truly dedicated government addicts can show up at city council meetings and wait for the public comment part of the meeting to vent frustration, speak passionately or simply state a position on an issue. City budgets are public record--but few citizens ever bother to look at them.

Recently, though, Burbank decided to take democracy back to its roots by inviting an eclectic group to take a close-up look at the inner workings of the city.

The reason: desperation.

Last fall, Burbank heard what all other California municipalities were hearing too--that it could expect less from the state for the coming year. What that meant was a $3-million cut in the city’s budget.

So under a plan concocted by City Manager Robert (Bud) Ovrom and Mayor Robert Bowne, two citizens committees were formed and the city threw open its books to the members in the hope that they could come up with some fresh ideas about how to make Burbank’s government more efficient.

Ovrom “is trying to turn a faithful old retriever into a show dog,” said Elizabeth Handler, a public relations executive who was on one committee.

“I’ve never heard of any level of government opening the books in this way and letting citizens poke around in there,” said Thomas Tunnicliffe, owner of a real estate company and chairman of one of the committees. “This has been an extraordinary process.”

The largest group, dubbed the FOCUS Task Force, has a remarkably mixed 15-person membership, including a nun, a city electrician, a foot doctor, a public relations executive, a developer, a former Burbank city manager, the owner of a metal plating company, a Burbank police sergeant and a city fire captain. The group plans to vote on its final recommendations to the City Council Wednesday.

The other group, which reported to the council on Jan. 12, is made up of three business people.

It was the FOCUS group that often had freewheeling forums, where the conversation would quickly shift from such weighty topics as contracting with private companies for city services to government sponsorship of a parade.

Take the following discussion at a recent meeting:

“The civil service system discourages innovation,” said one speaker. “We need to scrap the whole thing.”

“It’s more complex than that,” a city employee countered. “A lot more.”

About 30 seconds later the conversation meandered in another direction.

“Do you think taxpayers really should be spending money on a parade every year?” asked one man.

“I think it was kind of hokey,” another person chimed in.

“It is tacky,” said third person, “but the kids really enjoy marching. Burbank on Parade is an old tradition. People volunteer for this.”

“But anything we cut is going to offend someone ,” a fourth person added.

Neither committee actually succeeded in reinventing government, but both sure talked about it a lot.

“I think we pretty much discussed everything we could in three months,” said Don Farquhar, 70, a tire dealer and chairman of the FOCUS committee.

The committees, appointed by the mayor, began meeting in October and are making proposals to change the city finances in the next fiscal year. The groups arduously picked apart the budget line by line while discussing broader themes of local governance.

The committees also gave citizens a chance to tell the city what they thought was wrong with it. For example, Tunnicliffe is an outspoken developer who has sued the city several times.

The FOCUS process has been overseen by Ovrom, who admits he is obsessed with the notion of reinventing government or providing better services at lower cost.

“He’s a man with a mission,” said Elizabeth Handler, 48, a public relations consultant and FOCUS committee member. “He is trying to change a living organism.”

Ovrom asked the mayor to appoint a broad-based advisory committee in September not long after the bad news arrived from Sacramento. The mayor agreed and appointed the FOCUS committee, but he also decided to appoint the business panel for a “hard-nosed look” at city finances.

The city will have to make some tough decisions, Ovrom said. He has estimated that Burbank may have to cut $7 million more in 1993-94--another justification for the work of the citizen advisory committees.

“We need fresh eyes to look at what we do,” Ovrom said. “This recession could keep going for several more years. If the pie is getting smaller, then we have to examine new ways of doing things.”

Ovrom has been inspired by the book “Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector” by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler. He passed out copies as well as articles by and about the authors to each member of the FOCUS panel.

The authors advocate a wide range of structural and philosophical changes in the way governments operate. Some proposals include privatization of services, while others focus on changing the corporate culture and management structure of public agencies to focus on getting things done instead of just spending taxpayer money.

“The best way . . . is to think of citizens as customers of government,” the authors wrote. “Most businesses get their revenue directly from customers: If they please the customers, sales increase; if someone else pleases the customers more, sales decline.”

Their ideas have drawn the interest of public officials throughout the nation, most notably President Clinton, who promised during his campaign to “reinvent government” and criticized “brain-dead” policies.

Osborne has advised political leaders as diverse as Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, and Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a Republican.

Gaebler, a management consultant and the former city manager of Visalia, has known Ovrom for more than a decade.

Ovrom is such a fan of the book, he quotes passages from memory and spontaneously cites the page numbers of his favorite themes.

“These ideas aren’t all new to me,” Ovrom said. “I’ve been hoping for a chance to get people to look at the city in a new way for a long time.”

The recession that has drained state and city coffers gave him that chance.

Andy Lazzaretto, 50, a Burbank native who was city manager there from 1984 to 1987, praises the FOCUS process.

“Other cities are having their administrators or elected officials carefully review their budgets,” said Lazzaretto, who now works as a consultant to several Southern California cities. “Burbank is the only one that I’m aware of that has gone through it with that intensity, especially when it comes to involving the citizenry in the budget process.”

Burbank has increased citizen confidence in an era known more for voter outrage, Lazzaretto said.

“I think that by opening up our city books, we give government here more credibility,” Lazzaretto said.

The FOCUS committee’s preliminary recommendations, which one member described as “warm and fuzzy” compared to the business panel’s proposals, reflect the diverse but unwieldy composition of the group. The committee, which included the former president of the Burbank Chamber of Commerce and the president of the city’s largest employee union, tried to reach consensus.

“There wasn’t much butting of heads, but we certainly got an education,” said Sister Lucille Dean, a committee member and the principal of Providence High School.

Several FOCUS members described their mission as “service-oriented” rather than “number-oriented.” In meetings, members seemed more interested in preserving services than saving money.

“Libraries have been cut to the bone,” said Dean, who headed a subcommittee looking at the library. “Any fat there that might have been was cut out years ago.”

For many FOCUS committee participants, the process revolutionized the way they viewed government.

Dean and Handler, who oversaw a subcommittee looking at parks, pointed out that city parks and libraries have assumed roles in society larger than originally anticipated and that both function as de facto child care agencies.

Ed Skvarna, a Burbank police sergeant, pointed out to other committee members the importance of park and library youth programs in the battle against gangs.

“It seems minor, but programs that occupy the idle time of kids and teen-agers are a big help to fighting crime,” Skvarna said. “If you cut things like parks, libraries, schools, summer employment, you’ll find yourself spending more on law enforcement further down the line.”

But while members said they enjoyed and learned from the process, some questioned its long-term effectiveness.

“To really do this right, you’d have to study it for a year,” Farquhar said.

Handler agreed. “There is only so much information we can absorb.” She also wonders whether the City Council, which has ultimate budget authority, would pay any attention to their recommendations.

Ovrom conceded that the committee has not reinvented government. But it has gotten city officials to “think the unthinkable.”

“I still love the process,” Ovrom said. “I like it that you can get so many different people in the same room and actually agree on something.”