Every other fall, I submit a two-year budget and six-year financial plan to the Redmond City Council. Together we review the cost of city services through performance measures, agree to achieve certain outcomes and evaluate our revenue levels as a percentage of community income (price of government).
The price of government model provides a benchmark to measure the city’s revenue level and overall efficiency. In 2008, the city’s cost of government ran over 6 percent. Since then, the City Council and I worked to reduce the price of government to 5 percent, increasing our operational efficiency by 17 percent. To achieve these efficiencies, the city updated our technology, implemented process improvements and established an innovation fund.
The city updated and deployed new technology in the areas of accounting, building inspections, council agendas, capital project delivery, infrastructure maintenance and other functions. We took advantage of new technologies, which increased our total number of computer servers by three times while reducing physical servers by half. This enabled us to reduce the energy necessary to power that hardware by one-third. The results create greater capacity for our employees, improve the quality of our work and save taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars by reducing staffing requirements.
Implementing process improvement efforts generates another set of savings to the public. We began by focusing our service delivery systems around meeting our customers’ needs. Recently we added LEAN training for our employees. LEAN is a technique used by Toyota to generate constant improvement and efficiencies. Embracing this set of tools, employees reduced the time to process a commercial building permit by more than 50 percent. To date, we have improved our efficiency in the areas of purchasing, hiring and capital project delivery.
The establishment of an Innovation Fund is another notable accomplishment. First approved by the council in the 2013-14 budget, the fund invites city employees to present unique city projects for funding in a competitive process. Employees present a business case for an efficiency investment and report quarterly performance measures on winning projects to track their success. This program has resulted in service efficiencies and innovations across a wide range of city functions, including repurposing city recreation facilities, improving emergency response coordination, creating online volunteer recruitment and management tools and investing further in “cloud based” technology. The Innovation Fund continues to elicit projects and ideas that benefit the community in a variety of creative ways.
Taken together, these innovation and efficiency efforts have helped the city continue to deliver quality services with fewer staff. While historic staffing levels have hovered around 13 employees per capita, our fiscal-year 2015-16 budget staffing equates to an estimated 11.6 employees per capita. Through the city’s Budgeting by Priorities process, our focus on the price of government and our consistent emphasis on innovation and efficiency in service delivery, we will work to maintain and build the quality community our residents want in the most cost-effective way.
