Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Mayor's Management Report - Raising the Bar

Glenn Pasanen has a good review on the Gotham Gazette web site of Mayor Bloomberg’s Mayor’s Management Report (MMR). He is critical of the lack of links between numbers and explanatory information. He is right.

I have been so happy to see positives and negatives more even-handedly reported than under Mayor Giuliani (who only stressed the good news) that I have looked no further.

The full potential of the MMR, however, is not being exploited. It should be linked to the budget. We call it the Office of Management and Budget, but the Mayor's Office of Operations (MOO) is not milked (sorry) enough for management information - at least in what is given to the public.

Some years ago when I was Chief Economist at the City Comptroller's Office I worked with the Chief Accountant to see if we could develop a prototype of a budget that would correspond to the categories of the MMR. We did it. So it can be done. I'm sure I can find this prototype if anyone is interested.

1 comment:

  1. "Some years ago..." meaning you served under Alan Hevisi or Liz Holtzman?

    ReplyDelete