City Hall Aims High in First Setting of Goals

Los Angeles, you’ve got it in writing.

The police chief aims to reduce major crime by 10% in the coming year.

The city Department of Transportation plans to hand out up to 20% more parking tickets.

Animal Regulation intends to license cats.

And the head of the Department of Recreation and Parks is thinking about getting into the water park business.

For the first time ever, city department heads’ written, detailed goals for their agencies have been published--a little-noticed part of the budget Mayor Richard Riordan released April 21.

UCLA business school professor Bill Ouchi, the mayor’s chief of staff, called the goal-setting process “a big step” for the city’s bureaucrats.

“What we’re really trying to do is create a modern management culture at City Hall,” Ouchi said Friday.

“It won’t be done in one year, even two years--it’s going to take a number of years,” Ouchi said. “But we’ve started the process. It’s better late than never.”

If accomplished, some of the goals could have considerable ramifications for residents. A sampling of the general managers’ proposals:

* Robert Yates, head of the Department of Transportation, said he expects the acquisition of hand-held, ticket-writing computers to be one of the innovations that will enable his traffic officer force to produce 10% to 20% more tickets in the coming year. A recent management study of DOT found that the city traffic officers average only 37 tickets per eight-hour shift, compared to a standard of 90 per shift in other cities.

* Gary Olsen, head of the Animal Regulation Department, has pledged to increase his department’s revenues by $1.2 million in the coming year. He says he will do that by licensing cats, a new program; hiking the licensing fee for unaltered dogs from $20 to $30 (the fee for spayed or neutered dogs will stay at $10), and increasing from 14 to 40 the number of workers who canvass neighborhoods seeking to register unlicensed pets. The cat licensing measure, Olsen admits, is still a bit dicey. “We don’t have the entire humane community behind us on this,” he said.

* In the budget, Jackie Tatum, head of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, promised that her agency would explore 12 new entrepreneurial opportunities to raise additional revenue, including establishing more batting cages and a “water park, with surfing and water slides.” Although some have suggested that the city’s municipal golf courses should be privatized, Tatum said those plans “are on the back burner.”

* J. P. Ellman, president of the Board of Public Works, said her department will seek to establish five districts in the city where sidewalk vendors could peddle their wares legally. City lawmakers approved a two-year pilot vending plan in January, 1994, in response to demands from sidewalk merchants, most of whom are Latino.

* City Clerk Lee Martinez said he expects to have a system up and running by the end of the coming fiscal year that would permit residents to use their home computers to inspect City Council agendas and some other city documents. Martinez also said he hopes to increase by 50% the number of audits his department does of businesses to determine if they are paying their fair share of taxes.

* Police Chief Willie L. Williams has pledged to reduce major crimes in the city by 10% in the coming year, perhaps a safe bet given recent declines in reported crime. The LAPD chief said recently that he plans to accomplish this by putting more police on the street in the coming fiscal year (under the mayor’s Project Safety Plan Los Angeles, the chief is committed to adding 600 officers), focusing more effort on busting up street-level drug sales, turning 125 unmarked police cars into more highly visible black-and-white patrol vehicles and by conducting more major raids to break up gangs.

The chief also has promised to cut the number of citizen complaints against his staff by 10%--from 600 per year to 540--by increasing the level of supervision of rank-and-file officers in the field. This can be done by removing from the field supervisors responsibility for investigating citizen complaints and having such probes conducted by the Department of Internal Affairs. Better supervision lowers incidents of excessive force and verbal abuse, which are the sources of the most serious complaints, Williams said in an interview Friday. Outside the public’s view, the goal-setting program will play a key role in the performance evaluations of general managers--a process that takes on added significance in light of the recent passage of Charter Amendment 2, which gives Riordan sweeping new power to fire department heads.

Performance also will affect the merit pay given to the 33 general managers, 26 of whom are paid more than $100,000 a year. Under the city’s executive pay plan, increases--or decreases--of up to 5% can be given.

Still, many general managers say they welcome the goal-setting exercise that Riordan’s office put them through this year and say it is not so novel.

Establishing objective goals against which their performance can be measured--and publishing the goals for all to see--is not intimidating, but rather comforting, said Randall Bacon, head of the General Managers Assn.

“We like it,” said Bacon, who runs the city’s Department of General Services. “You either achieve the goals or you don’t.

“If the goals are subjective, the danger is that decisions can be made on the basis of ‘I don’t like your politics,’ or whatever,” Bacon said. “We don’t want a subjective evaluation process, particularly when we are dealing with politicians as judges.”

City budget office chief Keith Comrie, speaking for his own department, said Riordan’s goal-setting push is different only in degree from the practice under former Mayor Tom Bradley.

But what is undeniably new is the publication of the goals and the emphasis on them, Comrie said.

Still, Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley, Riordan’s budget czar, believes that the goal-setting revolution runs deeper than that.

After reading the first drafts of the goals the general managers submitted, Keeley said he found the majority were rather amorphous.

“Many of their early drafts were full of things like: ‘We’ll continue to do what we’ve always done,’ or ‘We’ll do the right thing,’ ” Keeley said. “But what we were looking for was a statement of goals that were measurable, discrete and important.”

Having measurable goals gives the mayor, the City Council and the public a leg up in assessing a general manager’s performance, Keeley said.

And putting the goals in writing, submitting them to the mayor’s office and then having them published for the public to see is no small innovation, Keeley said. “It makes sure everyone is kept on their toes.”