Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

The Plain Dealer’s big “analytical” comparison of county agency spending (Cuyahoga County agencies have more workers, less productivity than others in Ohio, Plain Dealer analysis finds) is such a misleading, misdirected mess that it’s hard to know where to start. What can you say about an “analysis” of comparative productivity and payroll efficiency that:

• Doesn’t even attempt to separate actual payroll costs from other expenditures?
• Compares agency staffing levels across counties without adjusting for differences in those agencies’ actual programs and responsibilities?
• Compares county treasurers’ “productivity” without reference to the income generated by their investment performances — even though optimizing the return on taxpayers’ money is a principal function of county treasurers everywhere?

Well, depending on where you fall on the Northeast Ohio Government Waste and Inefficiency Is The Problem Political Correctness Index (NEOGWIIPPCI), I guess you could say “This is well-intentioned but not very helpful.” Or you could say “This is stupid and any halfway competent editor would have trashed it”.  Or you could say “This is blatant yellow journalistic propaganda aimed at bringing down our Dear County Leaders.”

But wherever you land on this scale — even if you’re a NEOGWIIPPCI hundred-percenter who thinks Laura Johnston has a Pulitzer coming — you should be interested in another comparison that Johnston and her editors chose not to draw for us, though the ingredients are staring them (and us) in the face:

Yup, that’s right. Simple arithmetic applied to the PD’s own numbers show that Cuyahoga County’s total spending is by far the lowest per capita among Ohio’s five largest counties.

What does this tell us about our county’s relative efficiency or productivity or wastefulness or corruption? I don’t have a clue. Probably nothing at all.

But it does tell us something important about the value of simplistic, shallow, overhyped and agenda-driven statistical “analysis”.

Update 5/11: Apparently the editors really, really liked the parts of yesterday’s “analysis” targeting the Treasurer’s Office, because they just reprinted them as a whole separate article this morning. You’d think if they couldn’t be bothered to add any new content to a front-page story, they’d at least have found a different picture of Rokakis. But who knows… in a world of collapsing newsroom budgets, maybe repackaging the same story a few times is the PD’s version of journalistic efficiency and productivity.

Anyway, we’re all given another opportunity to admire Laura Johnston’s methodology, which goes like this:

She collected payroll and budget information, as well as benchmarks of the offices’ accomplishments, such as the number of property parcels appraised, public-assistance cases handled, jail inmates overseen and square feet of bridges maintained.

In addition to using numbers self-reported by the counties, she requested data from the state.

To compare employee workloads, she divided the number of employees and total budget in each agency by those benchmark common denominators.

The results do not show exactly how many employees are responsible for a given function, or how much each task costs.

Instead, the basic calculations show efficiency — the amount of work accomplished measured against the agency’s total number of employees, or the total budget. Government experts deemed the apples-to-apples comparison fair.

So “government experts” deemed it “fair”? You know, Ms. Johnston, that’s the kind of ass-covering claim that reporters usually feel requires a direct quote from a named source. Because if you’re going to pick arbitrary “benchmarks” to compare, and then make the comparison with data not directly related to your “benchmarks”, and then draw big, front-page headline conclusions from those comparisons, you really want some people with doctorates and professional reputations to tell us it’s legitimate.

Otherwise we might think your “analysis” is just sloppy and superficial, and that you’re either not very diligent or not very smart.

Otherwise we might wonder why you didn’t ask:

• How many of Rokakis’ 84 employees actually deal with current tax bills, versus the same job slots in other counties? And what’s their payroll cost? And what do they actually do? And how do those actual costs for those actual functions compare across the five counties? And why?
• And how many of Rokakis’ 84 employees work on recovering delinquent taxes, versus the same job slots in other counties? And what do they cost, and how productive are they in terms of dollars recovered for the treasury compared to other counties?
• And how many of Rokakis’ 84 employees work on managing county investments, versus the same job slots in other counties? And what do they do differently in order to achieve those higher rates of return that Johnston acknowledges but doesn’t include in her calculations? And how much are those higher rates of return worth to Cuyahoga County taxpayers? (Here’s a clue: This county has an investment portfolio of more than $500 million, so the difference between Rokakis’ 4.3% return and the 3.3% earned by Hamilton and Lucas would seem to be about $5 million a year.)
• And how many of Rokakis’ employees work on those “extra” programs like the HELP home improvement loan program and the County Foreclosure Prevention Program and the new County Land Bank development team? And what do these slots cost, and what funding sources pay for them? And how many foreclosures have been prevented, and home renovations carried out, as a result of those expenditures? And who exactly would be doing these things if Rokakis’ office wasn’t, and how would that be any more productive or efficient for the taxpayers? And if running these functions — all of which Rokakis innovated — out of the Treasurer’s Office is so questionable, why has the Plain Dealer editorially supported all of them?

See, with a little thought the real questions about efficiency and productivity are easy to identify, and not that hard to research. All the answers are in the public record. All it would take for the PD to produce a thorough, useful analytical report on the subject is some actual reporting and analysis.

Well, maybe that will be tomorrow’s front page story.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Economics, Planning, Politics & elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.