Wish

I wish everything worked the way I wanted it to.

My project here at the City has been an interesting experience. Coming from 15 years working in the private sector, the city government environment has been a major adjustment.

I realized early on that the normal motivating factors that drive decision making are very different in business and government. Concepts like competition, efficiency, profitability, and customer service, although not always accomplished in the private sector, are at least normally at the heart of most important decisions.

Since I tend to lean Libertarian in my civic thinking, I came in to the project already possessing a healthy skepticism about how governments operate. That skepticism has been nourished during my 3 years here and is as healthy as ever. I now know that many day to day decisions are made using the notions of survival and power as their basese rather than what we would all hope they would use, optimal service to the public.

My experience is that most city workers want to serve the public, and hold that as their best intention. But over time, those intentions seem to get pushed aside to make way for more basic realities. In this environment, virtually no organization, whether an entire department or a small specialized group, is safe from being reduced in size, taken over by other groups, reorganized, or cut altogether. For this reason, a substantial force in any decision involves looking at how mere survival might be affected.

My project here is a good example. We are here to provide the facilities to take payments for any city services over the Internet. Right now we offer about 14 services. The City contracts with my employer to provide our time, expertise, equipment, and support. It makes sense for the City to use contractors rather employees for this because of the flexibility we provide during the pilot period of a new project and the specialized nature of our work. The city pays for our services both by charging convenience fees for many types of payments (similar to Ticketmaster) and also out of the budgets of those departments we serve.

For the first three years of our project, convenience fees have not been able to cover our costs by themselves. It takes time for the general public to get used to the idea of using the Internet to do their business and many are only becoming aware of our existence online little by little. That said, our daily payment volume has grown at a healthy rate month by month, year by year.

We often have to fight the perception that taking payments over the Internet is a cost savings to the City. In theory, if a substantial enough portion of business was done this way, fewer human resources might be required. However, we are not there today, and it is unlikely any workers will be laid off due to our success any time soon. So what it does mean is more man hours and more equipment which is not how costs savings happen. As it is, the City has to come up with money from its budget to provide this convenience to its citizens.

Since much of our equipment will be paid for soon and our fee collections have been on the increase, I decided to forecast when the day might come that our project pays for itself with its own fee collections and no longer requires city funding.

It turns out that day is likely about a year from now, sooner than I thought. To me, this validates my project as a healthy exercise in providing services to citizens. At that break-even point, only the citizens that use the service are required to pay for it. I personally like government services that work this way, like riding the bus, paying a bridge toll, or licensing my dog to provide city animal care. Revenue structures like these allow services to naturally expand or contract based on citizen demand rather than being based on politics or skillful fund raising by city officials.

I went to report my great news to my city client. Unfortunately, rather than celebrating this news, he proceeded to explain to me that our fee source is still, like every other city source of income, subject to being cut or reduced due to political demands or the whims of certain departments. And further, that giving services to departments for free is inadvisable because of the feeling of entitlement it imparts to them. Departments must pay for services they receive otherwise they begin to abuse them. This conversation went on for a while and I became further and further disappointed in the fact that something wonderful like breaking even couldn't even be considered worthwhile in this environment of doom and gloom.

For now, I'll sleep better knowing that money is available for my job to continue, at least for the time being - money that will likely build up in city surpluses, whether they appreciate it or not.