We Need Competency & Leadership On City Council (Part 2)

Carroll G. Robinson

Regardless of who is elected the next Mayor of Houston, the reality is that fixing the city’s annual General Fund structural budget deficit will require submitting city government to a series of comprehensive outside performance, fiscal and management audits for recommendations on best practices to streamline and modernize the structure and operation of city government.

The city needs to bring in a nationally recognized and respected qualitative and quantitative management consultant to evaluate the organizational and management structures of city government to help determine how best to modernize city government and how best to improve delivery of city services to Houstonians while reducing the cost to do so.

This effort should be undertaken using a managed competition model where specifically organized working-groups of city employees would have the opportunity to offer proposals on how they would improve the management, structure and operation of city government to improve the delivery of city services while reducing expenses.

The best solutions from both the outside consultants as well as city employees should be adopted and implemented by City Council and the Mayor.

It’s no longer enough to say that government is not the private sector so it does not need to be concerned about quality, effective, timely and cost-effective customer (constituent) service for city residents or cost because it can just raise taxes.

The reality is that technological transformation being driven by artificial intelligence (A.I.), the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber & Lyft), and companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google are forcing change and modernization on both the private and public sectors.

If city government does not modernize itself, private sector innovation will undermine its relevance, value and tax base.

If City Hall continues to procrastinate, in a few years, it will be too late.

This is part of the reason why we need to elect caring and competent candidates to City Council this November.

(Part 1 of this series of commentaries was my Juneteenth special message eblast. It can be found on my Facebook page. All of this series will be posted on my Facebook page and Medium.)