America Works
America Works is a private for-profit company, but it deserves to be mentioned here because it works so well with state governments in reducing welfare rolls. America Works is an employment agency that finds entry-level jobs for poor unskilled workers and then monitors candidates and supports them in the workplace. Success is also profitable. Local governments that are innovative enough to use the service should be applauded.
A Cost Saving Act of Kindness
When Homestead High School in Cupertino, California outfitted its band with new uniforms it took the time to locate a school with the same name in Florida that could use the old uniforms. Commendation should be extended to officials at the two schools and the commercial moving company who agreed to deliver the uniforms.
Ford Foundation Innovation Awards for 1993
Each year ten innovative state and local government programs receive recognition and $100,000 grants from the Ford Foundation. Four of the winning programs are described below. The quotations are all from Governing magazine's November 1993 issue.
The Community Voice Mail program in Seattle Washington was developed by the Seattle Worker Center. It gives unemployed or homeless people a way to remain in contact with the world. A user gets a phone number, records a personal greeting and receives a private access code to retrieve messages. The system can be accessed from any touch-tone phone. ... A survey of 141 voice mail users between May and November 1992 indicated that 83 percent had found jobs in less than eight weeks. The program has an annual budget of $100,000. Each mail box costs only $2.90 a month. Besides getting welfare recipients into jobs more quickly, social workers spend less time tracking down clients and have more time to provide counseling.
Columbia, South Carolina received a grant for its Police Homeowner Loan Program. (The program) offers police officers low-interest, no-down-payment mortgages on inner-city homes that the city renovates for them. By renovat- ing rundown properties, the program helps revitalize neighborhoods and provide better housing. By moving police officers and their families into neighborhoods they serve, the plan enhances community-based policing and reduces crime rates. To encourage participation, the chief of police rewarded residency in the city with a Christmas bonus and made promotions dependent upon it. The success of the program was due to a combination of factors but an essential component is a strong and vibrant neighborhood organization.
Lansing, Michigan was recognized for its computer learning centers. Rather than ask businesses or schools to donate hand-me-down computers, $72,000 of housing commission funds was used to purchase state-of-the-art high tech computers "slicker than the computers at school". Since the housing commission set up three Computer Learning Centers three years ago, 80 percent of the 300 kids who live in the public housing projects have become regulars at the overcrowded but active centers, and kids from nearby neighborhoods have started to come, helping to break the isolation of public housing projects from neighborhoods that surround them. Schools report that the youngsters in the computer program are performing better academically, that school attendance is up and tardiness is down. The police department reports decreased youth involvement in crime and drug use in the housing projects and improved relationships between police and public housing residents. Parents who live in the projects are also wandering into the centers. Some...are taking community college business courses that the centers have begun to offer via computers.
Salem Oregon received its award for installing a new computerized bidding system which has saved Oregonians millions of dollars. Until January, 1992, requests for proposal (RFP) were handled in Oregon as they are in most places: Vendors registered with the state, then periodically received fat RFPs in the mail. Keeping the paper mill churning required several dozen bureaucrats, and postage was running at $144,000 a year. Now, instead of waiting for the mail, vendors use their modem- equipped personal computers (or those in chamber of commerce offices, libraries and community colleges round the state) to call the state's Vendor Information System computer. They can register on-line, download the appropriate RFPs and even have access to historical information: who got the last contract, who lost out, how much the winning and losing bids were. The cost of the equipment and the marketing of the system to vendors cost less than $400,000 whereas the savings due to more competitive and knowledgeable bidding saved the government more than $17 million in purchasing. Oregon is planning to expand the system to involve local governments and allow them to reap the savings also.
Entrepreneurial Government
The Montreal Olympics in 1977 left Canadian taxpayers with $1 billion debt that won't be paid off until sometime into the next century. The 1984 Olympics which took place in Los Angeles was a very different story; it turned a profit of $225 million. How? For the first time in 85 years it was financed without public money. Entrepreneurial organizers recruited corporate sponsors and 50,000 private sector volunteers to handle transportation, food services and even to provide the very sophisticated anti terrorist systems required to protect the thousands of dignitaries, athletes and tourists from 118 countries. With the 1984 Olympics as a model, public managers all across the county are beginning to ask "How can this turn a profit?"
Milwaukee sold sewage sludge for $7.5 million.
Phoenix gets an annual $750,000 by selling methane gas, a byproduct of its waste water treatment, to neighboring Mesa, Arizona. Mesa residents use the gas for cooking and heating.
Chicago used to pay $2 million a year to have abandoned cars towed. Now it receives $2 million a year from a private company that pays for the privilege of towing the cars.
The St. Louis Police Department developed a software program that allows officers to call in rather than write up their reports. This saves time and labor, but better still it generates $25,000 each time the software is sold to another police department.
The Washington State ferry system makes money from selling advertising in its terminals and leasing space to operators of two duty-free shops on two international ferries.
San Bruno, California operates its own cable television system which offers lower priced comparable service than its private sector competitors and makes a profit besides.
Paulding County, Georgia built a prison with four times the beds it needs and ended up with a $200,000 profit its first year by taking in the overflow from other jurisdictions.
Some enterprising California police departments have come up with a similar idea but without the expense of building a new prison. They rent blocks of cheap motel rooms over the weekends and pay someone to make sure convicted drunk drivers, who generally are sentenced to serving time on weekends, stay in the rooms. Whereas Georgia charges $35 a night for use of each bed, California inmates must pay $75 a night for their substitute jail cells.
Visalia, California found that it cost the city $140 to provide umpires, equipment and park maintenance to each softball team every season. It had been charging $25 per team. It decided to raise the fee to $90 because that's all they thought players would bear. However, the fee was finally set at $400 and city managers and softball players were both ecstatic. Why? Because they had decided to recruit team sponsors, who would pay the $400. Ballplayers no longer had to pay a fee, merchants got inexpensive advertising and loyal customers, and the city earned $260 per team, per season." But the story goes on. Soon there were 300 teams and there simply weren't enough toilets. "The finance director assured the recreation director that if she wrote up a request she could get portable toilets tacked onto the end of the five-year capital improvement plan. If she could get a state matching grant, in six or seven year the city could buy her some new toilets. The recreation director set up a concession stand and leased it to A/W Root Beer, the highest bidder. It took 31 months to recoup the money spent on the toilets and from then on the stand generated pure profit of at least $24,000 a year. The ballplayers got not only their toilets, but the opportunity to buy soft drinks, beer, and hot dogs. A and W earned a profit, but so did the city. Where were the losers in that story?
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