Chairperson Stutsman called the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to order in the Johnson County Administration Building as a Department Head Meeting at 2:03 p.m. Members present were: Joseph Bolkcom, Charles Duffy, Jonathan Jordahl, Stephen Lacina, and Sally Stutsman.
Department heads present were: Ambulance Director Mike Sullivan, City Assessor Dan Hudson, Conservation Director Rod Dunlap, County Assessor Jerry Musser, County Attorney Pat White, County Auditor Tom Slockett, County Engineer Mike Gardner, County Recorder Deborah Conger, County Sheriff Robert Carpenter, County Treasurer Cletus Redlinger, Department of Human Services Area Administrator Cheryl Whitney, General Relief Director Mary Kay Hull, Information Services Director Jean Schultz, Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities Director Craig Mosher, Physical Plant Manager Pat Langenberg, Planning and Zoning Administrator Rick Dvorak, Public Health Director Graham Dameron, Interim SEATS Director Burnell Chadek, Veterans Affairs Commission Director Leo Baier, and Mental Health Advocate Veda Higgins.
Staff present were: Board of Supervisors Administrative Assistant Carol Peters, Sheriff's Department Captain Duane Lewis, Deputy Information Services Director Gary Yoder, and Auditor's Office Recording Secretary Casie Parkins.
Stutsman: First thing on the agenda is the salary survey and we have Mr. Jerry Thompson who is Senior Associate of Jack Lipovac and Associates from Des Moines. The Board has contracted with him to do the salary survey and so he's going to explain to us how the process goes.
Jack A. Lipovac and Associates Senior Associate Jerry Thompson: Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. I have to apologize for my voice. I caught a little bit of a cold from my grandson last weekend. If I cough (inaudible) please bear with me. I don't know how familiar you are with the concept of a salary survey. The main thing is we want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. The first part of the process, by the way I guess you all understand, this has to do with only non-bargaining unit employees. It won't cover anybody who is covered by a labor contract at this time. At any rate the job description is the key thing that describes the job, the basic tasks, the basic duties, the skills and abilities and education experience requirements to make sure that when we go out and ask somebody else about their Clerk I or their Clerk III or their Secretary to compare with whatever job you've got here we need to have that. It's my understanding at the present time we have about half of those job descriptions in place, most of them fairly recently. What we'll be doing in those cases is to ask you as supervisors and department directors to sit down with your employees and review those to make sure that they are in fact current and accurate. For those that do not have a job description now we will be passing out a questionnaire. The plan is that we'll have a meeting probably the week after next with all of you to go through the questionnaire and explain some of the key parts to it. At any rate the employee will be asked to complete the questionnaire so we will be gathering those back to make a draft of the job description, get that back to you and the employee to review for accuracy and completeness, scratching out anything that's inappropriate or adding things that we may have overlooked. Then we'll produce a final draft from that. Once we have an understanding of what the jobs are, the Board has already identified some comparison agencies from other counties and other cities and public employees. We'll compare those salary grades. We don't do it for every single job. There is a job description, but not every job is included in the survey. There are a bunch of benchmark jobs that we'll collect data on and then we'll evaluate the external data with the internal evaluation of the jobs and make a recommendation back to the Board for any finalizations. That's kind of it in a nut shell. I understand our time is currently tight. I'll be happy to try and answer any questions that you have on the process.
Planning and Zoning Administrator Rick Dvorak: Jerry, do you include private sector at all in your comparisons?
Thompson: No, this will just be public sector employees.
Dvorak: Is there any reason why?
Thompson: We had quite a bit of discussion. We met with the Board for about an hour this morning talking about the pros and cons of that. It was the Board's decision that we're really public employees and that that's the most applicable, most important comparison to make. The are a lot of complications once you add in private sector data.
Dvorak: I was thinking we lost a County Engineer last year and an Assistant County Engineer last Friday to the private sector, that why I thought...
Thompson: Well there was discussion about that and we understand that is a concern. My suggestion to the Board was, I think they're going to follow up on that to some extent, where there are particular problems there may be some additional work done later on to look into some of those areas, such as computers, attorney's, and engineers.
Stutsman: Part of what we talked about this morning was when we went down the list of jobs there weren't a whole lot of jobs that had comparable job descriptions in the private sector. You can pick out Information Services and the Engineer and things, but when you start talking about some of the more specific jobs that we perform, like with Conservation or in the Health Department, you know there's really not much you can compare with in the private sector. That was part of the reason why we decided to limit it to county government.
Bolkcom: I think the survey in general I think, people in government leak over to the private sector. I don't think the survey necessarily is going to stop that for these highly skilled types of jobs.
Dvorak: Would you provide a better wage for that person that was comparable (inaudible)...
Bolkcom: I'm not debating. I'm just saying in general it's really... We are not looking at raising everybody's salary to the technical position 20 or 30 thousand dollars. I think that's right if that were our goal but I think historically and from here on out you're still going to see people in the public sector leave to get more money in the private sector in skill positions.
Jordahl: Well I think the Board recognizes there is that problem and I think we want to ameliorate that problem right? Not necessarily fix it by making the salaries equal but that it would be a kind of separate consideration from the salary survey in as much that we don't' want the salary survey to look at private sector equivalents for all of these positions, which may not have private sector equivalents.
Director of Public Health Graham Dameron: Jerry will all of the questionnaires be filled out by everyone?
Thompson: It's not really necessary to do that. I think it would just be those people for job descriptions who do not have full job descriptions now and even in the case of multi-position classifications. We wouldn't' have to have each person do that. We'd get a representative sampling of each group. Public Health Nurse I think is one that Carol and I have talked about. Where did Carol go? We talked about that one today. We'll probably get about 1/3 of the people and give them class where you've got several in one title.
Dameron: OK.
Thompson: For people who already have a job description, that's correct, there is no need for them to fill out a questionnaire. When we get into that and we get back together in a couple of weeks and have that meeting, the questionnaire is very lengthy. It's probably 18 or 19 pages. A lot of it is simply reading a sentence and putting a check in a box for what applies to your particular job or the employees job. The toughest part is writing out your actual duties. It does require the employee sit down and write out what their tasks and what their assignments are. It's the key in the (inaudible). That's the hard part. We can assist to some extent by providing a job description that maybe someplace else is similar set in duties and let them kind of read through that and give them some ideas, well yes I do this or maybe in my job I don't do that so I don't need to write it down.
Dameron: Do you have some other comparable job descriptions from other counties that could be used as possibly as a comparison with the...
Thompson: Well like I say, that's kind of a policy decision on how we go about doing that.
Dameron: Well the reason I was asking you this is that I've updated all of the job descriptions for the department and asked the staff to help with that and they had it much more elaborate of course. I cut it down substantially to make it more generic and yet specific. My fear was that perhaps I didn't put as much into that job description as maybe required or necessary. The questionnaire would perhaps equalize that out however knowing it's a long thing. I don't know.
Thompson: The danger in giving you boiler plate language from another job description is that someone really doesn't take the time and effort to think through their job. The tendency would be to simply copy down what they see and I've done my job. If you don't provide that, then it really forces the person to sit down and think about what they do. We don't ask for every task and every procedure, that's more like a desk procedure and when we get into this I'll explain to all of you that we're not looking for a desk procedure. We don't want to be able to have somebody sit down and read this job description and know exactly what they do with the yellow piece of paper that gets on their desk right there in the green basket and so forth. That's not what we're talking about. When you read a job description you get a general idea of what that job is, why it exists, what importance does it have, what are the key functions and what are the basic requirements. Most jobs within that job title are going to be interchangeable from one desk to another. Probably the easiest description would be like a police officer. For the most part a police officer is a police officer is a police officer, a sheriff's deputy is a sheriff's deputy. A bus driver is a bus driver. They have different routes, they have different streets, but they all do basically the same function. So you don't have to have a separate job description for each person. You may have a separate desk procedure, because a Sheriff's deputy and a police officer and the bus driver is going to have a different route. Instead of making left turns, they're going to make right turns. It's very important to get people thinking about the job itself not the incumbent that's in it. We'll go through all of that in considerable more detail.
County Sheriff Robert Carpenter: What does the Board really want to do with this, because number one apparently there isn't going to be financing probably available to do anything with the results anyway and number 2, I just don't agree with what you just said. A police officer and a deputy sheriff is a day and light difference.
Thompson: Excuse me I didn't say that.
Carpenter: Well no you said a police officer is a police officer is a police officer. But if you look in the code you'll see the duties of a deputy sheriff are twice the duties of a police officer.
Thompson: Sir, I didn't say a sheriff's deputy was the same as a police officer or a bus driver. I said a police officer is among themselves, sheriff's deputies among themselves, bus drivers among themselves. I''m not suggesting (inaudible).
Carpenter: The only question I've got for the Board, if we can afford to pay for this type of survey what does the Board expect to gain by this, if in turn the employees can't expect to gain something from it too. Because we don't know if there is going to be funding or if there ever will be. We're not promising them anything. They've got their duties, their jobs, they know what they're doing. What does the County gain by putting this expense out? That's my only question.
Stutsman: I think what the Board wanted to do is that we did put some moneys aside to make some salary adjustments. We didn't have the tools to know how to apply that money equitably and fairly and so we thought this would give us the survey results that then we could begin to see where we're way out of sync, where we're right on the money and then make those adjustments accordingly. We have people come in and I can think of a couple situations where people requested pay raises, well yes. They looked like they were underpaid but I didn't know based on what? This will give us a chance to compare to a person doing a similar job in another situation this is what the average is, this is what the pay is. I don't know if anybody else on the Board wants to add anything or...
Jordahl: We set aside some money in part to address the question of whether it was attractive for someone to... It happened in a case or 2 where a person had either not taken a promotion or had actually asked to go backwards in order to make more money as a line employee rather than as an administrator and in order to preserve quality experienced administrative staff in those roles, we wanted to make sure the salary structure adequately reflected the responsibilities people had. That's part of it. Then the question of if we're going to do those enhancements to adjust that, lets do it fairly rather than on the basis of what an immediate crisis is in a department, or somebody is leaving or something, but to do it across the Board.
Carpenter: Was this something the Board is going to set up for the elected officials, to tell the elected officials what their people are going to be paid or what? Or is that something of an option for the department head.
Stutsman: Well you could bring that information to us and then we could decide whether we have it in the budget to do it is...
Jordahl: And you would get salary survey results for your department and you could still retain the authority to say... Well I'm not going to do this or I'm going to do something other than this. But it would give the base information to make a judgment on that would...
Carpenter: Well what happens if I say this person should have an increase in salary, because of their workload and what they're doing here and you people take a look at the survey and say there is no way. Does that mean that I don't have that option anymore, where as now I do?
Jordahl: It's another important question. I think that discretion to give merit raises is an important part of this overall looking at this thing, is that there should be room for that I think.
Carpenter: I think there is a difference between department heads and your folks groups that you oversee as to how you pertain and you want your salary scales, but I think the elected officials the bottom line should be if left up to the department head, the elected officials as to how they raise their people and that they're capable of getting a raise that they should be... The Board shouldn't have a piece of paper that says well I don't think this is in here, because you know as well as I do that you can have the same type of job description and some people will outperform others.
Stutsman: Well I guess I see this, how I see using it as more of a tool so that we can work with the department heads or the elected officials and say this is what we found, this is how these jobs compare to other government entities or whatever doing the same kinds of jobs. If you think it's OK the way it is fine. If you think these people need raises then this will give us the tool to say yes, your right on the marker, no this is way off compared to other similar situations.
Carpenter: I don't disagree with it. I've just got questions I'd like to have answered and I don't know that anybody has answered them yet.
Bolkcom: I think elected officials are going to continue to have the same autonomy and pay their people whatever they want. But we think as a county we need to do a survey across the Board to see where we are. We do know of a few situations that have been brought before the Board where we've had people that as Jonathan pointed out that example of going and staying in rank and file positions because they could make more than going into administrative positions. If we start tinkering there without having a broader sense of how we're doing, other people in other departments say well you gave him a raise, why aren't you giving us a raise? Or we have some departments that will come to the Board and they will be a little bit stronger advocates. They'll keep showing us saying we need a raise, we need a raise, and we don't know how it compares to other places but when you start tinkering one department other people see that and then we're tinkering over here, and here and we don't really have a good picture about where we should be and we think this survey is going to give us a little more confidence about that. But again I think elected officials are still going to have autonomy to make decisions about compensation of their employees with or without a survey.
Carpenter: I certainly hope so because I don't expect to tell you folks how to run your department. You're over their department head. I expect to tell you how to run that and who should or who shouldn't be getting a salary increase and stuff like that anymore than I expect you to tell me.
Bolkcom: Right.
Stutsman: You're right.
Jordahl: That's my judgment of this survey, I assume might be the idea of a range for a position that a person might enter, a brand new Deputy someplace and without respect to specific steps of years in service or something that it could be adjusted according to experience for example coming in or in terms of merit that is expressed as a person goes about their job. You might have a salary range of 10, 12,000 dollars between the bottom or top that would be suggested coming out of the survey rather than one hard number.
Carpenter: So you guys are going to get into civil service too? Civil service employees also? That's part of what your talking about.
Thompson: I'm not getting into civil service.
Conservation Director Rod Dunlap: Well, you have the same situation with your Boards too. You don't set the salaries for the Health Department...
Stutsman: No.
Dunlap: ...or the Conservation Board, so you've got a similar situation there. I guess my question is is this- You need job descriptions on the employees to do a salary comparison right? Are you talking about doing to job descriptions on those employees that don't have one now or are you going to revise present job descriptions?
Thompson: Both. We will develop job descriptions for people that do not currently have one, the last thing somebody gave you, we'll make sure they are still current and up to date.
Dunlap: And then from that then you do your salary survey?
Thompson: Because we have for example Clerk I in Johnson County. Some other County may have Clerk I that is totally different job they just happen to call it Clerk I, so you need to know what the job is so we're comparing apples to apples.
Dunlap: Well I think it important before this Board, the Board of Supervisors approves those job descriptions that particularly those job descriptions that are of the employees of your Boards that have the autonomy, that you don't set the pay scale for that particular job for the Conservation Board. It is my particular interest that those are run through the Conservation Board, those Boards with their approval before this Board takes any formal action on it.
Bolkcom: That's how job descriptions are currently done Rod, through the Conservation, when there is a new person?
Dunlap: Yes.
Bolkcom: OK. Doesn't' seem like a big problem.
Stutsman: No.
Dunlap: Then the merit, the step and grade system is assigned to that particular job by the Conservation Board.
Thompson: What this will do really is provide more information for everybody. More factual information to go on when we start considering salaries. We're not talking individual performance here. I'm talking about...
Dunlap: I understand that.
Thompson: (Inaudible). Saying what the pay for this job ought to be.
Dunlap: Another question. Job descriptions, do you do lengthy ones or short ones?
Thompson: They're typically 2 to 2 and a half pages.
Dunlap: That's too long, according to the procedures used today in industry and business.
Thompson: Not the ones that I'm familiar with.
Dameron: Most I've seen is around 2 pages max.
Dunlap: Well I'm only familiar with my own department and maybe some other departments at the University, the personnel that they say they're trying to go to shorter job descriptions, more general and not as specific and not as detailed. Your not able to spell out everybody's job. In a job description if its lengthy then you have that problem of that employee is geared for that particular job and anything extra they may not want to do or the description is so long that it makes them look like a super person and then a super person has to fill that position. There is a movement towards and other job assignments.
Thompson: I agree with that. It shouldn't' be all inclusive. We don't write them like that.
Dunlap: Well particularly in our agency we can't get that specialized in job descriptions, because everybody is doing basically everybody else's job.
Thompson: It's like that a lot with a lot of jobs.
Dunlap: And small departments such as ours and I'm sure there's many in this room, you've got people filling in for other people. I know that the Sheriff's deputy necessarily, he may be a Sheriff's deputy, but one of this primary assignments may not be road patrol. It may be working some other field in that officers box or that service responsibility.
Lacina: The format will be similar to what we use now. It will be two tiered. The first part will be a description of the job to be done and the second part will be the skills necessary. So it isn't like it's a 2 or a 2 and a half page narrative of here's all of the things you will do. We'll try to stay as close to what we have now if we can.
Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities Director Craig Mosher: So you have a particular format you want these in?
Thompson: No, we're going to follow the County's existing format. You have a copy of that I understand and we're going to continue to provide that same information, same format. The details as we went over earlier, we usually talk about the most important 8, 10 or 12 tasks performed. That's an example of the types of duties and kinds of things the job will involve; there is also a narrative (inaudible) a general description (inaudible). The rest has to do with qualifications, ADA considerations and so forth. There's a lot of different formats out there. I'm not going to tell you one is any better than the other one. The one you have now is fine.
Jordahl: We did discuss this morning Rod, the idea of other duties as assigned, that that's an important part of the job description. I suggest that we might even want to expand that to encompass the idea of other people sort of doing other jobs at various times, sort of filling in and covering them and so forth, that that could become part of a job description I would suggest.
Dunlap: Well I know, I've been through this before several times. If you had an employee sit down and give you the information for a job description, what they actually do, they'll fill pages.
Thompson: Some will and some won't.
Dunlap: If I was to sit down and do my own, you'd probably have the manual there. Well where do you start. Really the information that I have and I'm one that has trashed this department for a period of time with some lengthy job descriptions, but when I redo them, they're much more brief and more general. I find them much easier and the employee finds them much easier to work with.
County Auditor Tom Slockett: I've got kind of a basic question, I'm sorry I was a few minutes late, did you discuss, is this a salary survey compared to the labor market in this area or is it compared to other counties?
Thompson: The Board has decided to survey other counties and other cities, other public employees, not private employees.
Slockett: So by other cities does that include Iowa City?
Thompson: Yes.
Stutsman: The cities that we decided on were Iowa City and the University of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Marion, Ames, Davenport, and Dubuque. The counties were Linn, Scott, Dubuque, and Story.
Slockett: OK. I guess I would think the more you can focus on our own labor market the better because that's where we exist. That's where our employees go to and where they come from.
Information Services Director Jean Schultz: What about Black Hawk County, your not going to do Black Hawk County?
Stutsman: We decided not to do Black Hawk County.
County Treasurer Cletus Redlinger: Tom, it's also just non-union employees.
Slockett: Uh-huh.
Dvorak: You're not going to do Polk either?
Dunlap: Well certainly you have to look at the cost-of-living in Johnson County.
Slockett: Yes.
Dunlap: Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but the towns you just mentioned and the counties from my experience this is the highest cost of living. I had done a study of those different counties before for the Conservation Board a number of years ago and the information was quite helpful, but I also found out that there wasn't quite the compliance in terms of the wages, because of the high cost-of-living in this area.
Slockett: There's a big difference in the cost of living between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City for example. It's much lower there, and I don't know how useful that is, but it's interesting anyway.
Jordahl: Mr. Thompson there is a discussion here of cost of living in the area, does that factor into this?
Thompson: Normally not, but we could certainly add a component. We can get information from the Chamber of Commerce and there is a State department also that published statistical information of the different costs-of-living in different metro areas. Cedar Rapids is one, Des Moines, I think Iowa City is separate from Cedar Rapids, but I'm not sure.
Duffy: I hope so.
Thompson: The Chamber may have some additional information on that. Let me get back to you on that, at least provide that basic information that you all can factor in what relevance it has.
Stutsman: Are there any other questions?
Duffy: Good luck.
Duffy left at 2:20 p.m.
Stutsman: When will you start then Jerry?
Thompson: Hopefully week after next. It's going to take us a little homework to get done, but then I'll talk with Carol and then we planned to ask for a meeting with the Department heads the week after next.
Administrative Assistant Carol Peters: As long as everybody is here may be we could set that up now.
Dameron: October what Carol?
Dunlap: Let me make a strong suggestion that this would be a good winter project.
Bolkcom: Winter is coming Rod.
Dameron: Winter is here.
Stutsman: Duane?
Sheriff's Department Captain Duane Lewis: Sally, I have a (inaudible) question, when you're not talking about giving this example of someplace else in a boiler plate for them to compare about, another statement you said that some employees will write out 16 pages worth of what they've done. Another one will sit down and write down 3 that they feel is pertinent. If we're just going at this ground level, should we tell all of our employees to quit doing anything else other than trying to establish the best job description they can for this survey, because we in theory should maybe go out and hire some help to write it, if they're going to take what we put together as this job description goes out to be compared to other people when we don't know what we're being compared to. It's just how do we approach this when you say it's going to take a lot of time, should we tell our people to write 16 pages or keep them brief like Rod says, how should we instruct them, because this could affect their wages for along time.
Thompson: The questionnaire I think addresses that. We have space in there for I think about 12 key tasks. We don't ask for more than that. If someone wants to do it they can attach more, it's my experience that very few people do that.
Lewis: Wouldn't' it affect or make them look more responsible and higher their wage if they put down everything?
Thompson: No, because it's only the handhold key to responsibility to their job. We don't care if they make the coffee or sweep the floor or once every 3 months they have some little detail to do.
Lewis: Well Blackhawk County writes theirs that way and we write ours to the 6 or 7 main specifics are they going to be prepared fairly?
Thompson: I believe they will.
Lewis: I don't know, but it's a question I have as to how instruct our people as to whether to go out and get other examples and spend a lot of time and...
Thompson: I think the best instruction is to be honest, be thorough, but don't get into the tedious. Be complete, if you think it's important put it down. If it's not really important don't put it down. Like I say, most of this is just checkpoints. It doesn't invite a lot of extremist stuff. Now you will have a few people who want to do that. We've dealt with that before. Frankly the problem is usually on the other side, people don't do a very good job writing down these things and then we come back and write the job description based on our experience, we know that this type of person, this person has this kind job in other places, typically does theses duties. We'll write that in. That's the purpose of the first draft. We send them back and they say well your right, we do do these 2 things, but we don't do this and then they scratch something out. So the final product should be fairly accurate in describing the jobs.
Jordahl: I think that to amplify this question, there are sort of 2 aspects of what does not need to be done or what we won't be doing as part of this salary survey. One of them you haven't really dwelled on and that is the positions which may not need new position descriptions written where we had a list of say 40 or so positions that already had the positions done and maybe didn't need to be redone; maybe should be reviewed, maybe have been reviewed recently, I think it might address some of the concern here if you would speak for a minute about what is not going to be done and in the same vein to address this question of what is not expected of the departments. In other words would you be personally or your staff reviewing, revising these job descriptions, or is it something that's expected to involve a lot of departmental involvement.
Thompson: My understanding was that the project originally was that we would simply oversee, and coordinate a review of the existing job descriptions. I didn't understand initially that they were only about half in place. Since we've had the discussion with the Board this morning, we will go ahead and assist with the development of those additional, but the ones that were already in place, I think I did mention that we'd simply asked that everybody review those, and if a couple of changes have occurred since a year ago or whenever they were done, that's fine, those staff will redo those. But every department head, every supervisor, will sign off on what job descriptions are agreed it's accurate, it's complete, it's up-to-date. I'm going to ask the employee to do that when the (inaudible). The whole key is to point out exactly what is here so we'll know what to compare it with when we go out and compare it.
Stutsman: Part of the reason why the Board selected Jerry's company to go with is that he does have experience with doing salary surveys for county government so he has a pretty good idea of what the expect from these job descriptions. So to address you question Duane, I think Jerry can see if somebody is putting a lot in there that really doesn't need to be done.
Thompson: When I first started doing these things I had a full head of hair.
Dvorak: I've worked with Jack doing the same thing when I was in Cedar County. They do do a very good job, if that's worth anything. They're very good and they're very honest and they work hard. I would have recommended you hired them, lets' put it that way.
Stutsman: Good, I'm glad you agreed with our decision.
Dvorak: It's the first time.
Stutsman: I'll remember forever and ever. Any other questions? Carol did you have anything to add?
Peters: I was just wondering if people would want to look at their calendars and as long as you're all here to set up a time when Jerry can to meet with the department heads.
Redlinger: You don't mean the people that have union contracts do you?
Thompson: No.
Stutsman: No.
Thompson: This covers about 80 jobs and about 200 people.
Bolkcom: Do you want it in 2 weeks Carol?
Peters: That's what Jerry had suggested.
Thompson: Well I'm flexible. If that's not a good week, I thought we were talking week after next.
Peters: Is there a time that would be good or close to good for everybody in the week of October 6th?
Dameron: Well the 7th would be OK.
Slockett: The 7th is election day.
Musser: The 6th and 7th are out, because of the GIS conference.
Peters: How about the 8th?
Thompson: 1:00? 2:00?
Department of Human Services Area Administrator Cheryl Whitney: Did I understand this right, everybody who is covered by a collective bargaining contract, we're not addressing those jobs.
Thompson: That's correct. Did you include a list of the jobs?
Peters: No, I didn't. I wanted to have another opportunity to go back and...
Thompson: They are the non-bargaining unit jobs? So what are we talking? 2:00 on the 8th?
Stutsman: 2:00, October 8th.
Thompson: OK.
Stutsman: OK.
Thompson: Any other questions?
Stutsman: Everybody got a copy of the salary survey proposal that Jerry put together, so people can look that over for the 8th.
Thompson: OK. Thank you all.
Stutsman: Thank you.
DISCUSSION: FY99 BUDGET PROCEDURES
Stutsman: Moving onto budget. I hope you all got a copy of the memo that came out concerning the budget. Those were distributed yesterday. There really aren't any changes in that memo. We're pretty much asking for the same things as we did last year. The only caution is that we have gotten word from the legislature not to go crazy with these budgets being that the property freeze is off. We hear from the legislature and from the Governor's office that they're going to be watching County budgets very, very closely and if they feel that they're doing a lot of spiking with property taxes that probably it will be good excuse for them to put the budget freeze back on again. We want you to certainly present your requests, but try to hold the line as much as possible.
Dunlap: I've got a copy, but I haven't had a chance to review it. Are you asking for the same thing as last year.
Stutsman: You mean as far as no increase? Well we're not under the budget freeze so if you have needs put those down. You can increase budgets this year, but we just don't want to see a lot of increases. Because I don't think the Board wants to raise property taxes, if at all possible, but we'll have to see what the needs are too. Any Board members have anything to add to that? If there are no questions about that memo?
Bolkcom: Has everybody seen the memo? There are some specific instructions about a few different things, technology...
Stutsman: We can get copies before you leave.
DISCUSSION: PERFORMANCE-BASED BUDGETING
Stutsman: Another thing the Board wanted to talk to department heads this afternoon is an initiative we want to begin looking at and begin to put in place for the County and that performance-based budgeting. Last year when we went through the budgeting process the Board members spent a great deal of time on the budget. I don't think any of us mind spending that time on the budget. I think we all feel very strongly that that's what we're here for and the budget is probably the most important thing we do. But we kept asking ourselves, is there a better way to do this budget process and as we were asking that question at ISAC last year, there was a presentation done by Dawn Gingrich of Linn County about performance-based budgeting and I think several of the Supervisors attended that presentation and thought she and Linn County had some good ideas of how they approached the budgeting process. So when we started looking at a strategic goal planning and things, one of the things we included in that was to do some rework of the budget process. We went and visited with Linn County and Scott County to see what they were doing with their budget and both of them have a form of performance-based budgeting and so we thought this would be a good idea to begin looking at doing some of this kind of thing here in Johnson County. Along with that the State has also moved towards performance-based budgeting. I think they have a slightly different terminology for it, but it's basically the same thing. As well as the Government Accounting Standards Board is recommending that some kind of performance-based budgeting be applicable to County governments. So we feel that we're pretty well on track at looking at this type of budgeting at Johnson County. We have some handouts that we'd like to give to you and maybe go through to kind of explain a little bit more about what performance-based budgeting is all about. I don't know how many of you are familiar with it or what it involves. I think the Board is interested in putting this in place. We know that this is going to be a big project and a long term project and we thought we'd at least get started with it during this budget go around and begin directing department heads to look at this form of budgeting and see if this isn't something that we can really begin working on. I think it will have benefits for all of us. As we continue to grow I think it will help meet out needs and respond to our growth and it will be a better tool for the Supervisors. I think so many times when department heads come in with requests it's real difficult. We know the needs are there and yet we don't have any real concrete tools to assess what we're doing and if this is the best use of our money. We're having a feeling too that tax payers are asking those kinds of questions too. They want to know what we're doing and if the programs we have in place are a good use of our dollars. So this will give us those kinds of tools to make those decisions. Has everybody got a copy of that handout? This was put together by Deloitte and Touche for NaCO. It's a pretty general overview about performance-based budgeting. So I thought if we could just kind of go through this, it would give us some better ideas of what this is all about. So why don't we turn to page 4, an overview of performance measurement and benchmarking. This allocates resources to achieve specific objectives based on program goals and measured results. The traditional approach to County spending focus's on incremental changes in line item expenses and categories and performance measurements and benchmarking focuses on spending results rather than on money spent. So instead of just looking at budgets based on revenues and expenditures, we will set up some kind of performance-based budgeting, so that we will have goals and then we'll decide, you'll put your budget together based on how you will achieve those goals. Then you can have benchmarks to see if that's actually what has been done. Counties must use performance measures and benchmarking analysis to identify the improvement opportunities and best practices to an enhances performances. I think on the next page it kind of shows that this is not particularly a new concept. I think it's been presented in different ways through the years with different means and the latest is performance measurement and benchmarking. There again, practitioners can evaluate the performance measure approach to past efforts with the same goals. So it's linking planning management and budgeting, so that we're all working together, so that we can all see that the necessary linkages to ensure performance is integrated into all County activities.
Dameron: Sally I think isn't the State somewhat working on, have you heard the term BFR?
Stutsman: Right.
Dameron: Which I think is just the same thing but maybe a little different terminology. Budgeting for results.
Stutsman: Right, I'm sure Cheryl can talk a lot about that or address all of that as done. But that's been state legislation that was enacted by the legislators saying that they wanted all State government to begin looking at this kind of budget performance. By the year 2000 all of the State departments will be doing this kind of budgeting?
Department of Human Services Area Administrator Cheryl Whitney: (Inaudible) from one year to the next you see the growth in that. You know it really has helped us identify what is it that we really want to accomplish. So much of the time we say process kinds of things. We'll serve X numbers of people, well so what does that really mean? What is the outcome? So we moved more towards saying this year we will have more completed options for (inaudible) for example. Setting goals and then working towards reaching those goals. That way it helps us know working with (inaudible) for us to reach that when above all we need these resources. It allows for varied discussion and negotiations of these resources. Plus whenever you set a goal and your working towards that goal and you made it keeps you focused. It's really been helpful and not just for our agency. The biggest thing it's done is help the people we serve.
Stutsman: Well and not only that, but I think it really serves a purpose for the taxpayers to understand what their moneys are going for because I saw an example of the Department of Human Services budget and it's just very well spelled out what the goals are, what their strategies are and if they've accomplished what they said they're going to do and if it did have an impact, if those dollars were well spent and if the benchmarks weren't achieved then to say how we can do it better next time.
Whitney: Well and if we said we want to hire 100 social workers, they would think Oh, sure. But if we say we need the resources so that we can have 100 children placed for adoption within 2 years of the removal from their home, that's something that regular people can understand and buy into it like it means something, much more than just having these people on the payroll.
Stutsman: I'm not going to go through this whole handout, I would encourage you to look through this. Maybe it would give you some more insight into what performance-based budgeting... How many of you are familiar with performance based budgeting or have any ideas about... OK so it's a few of you have some background on that. One of the things that you need to do with performance-based budgeting is to put together indicators for your individual department and this is done entirely by the department heads and the employees. Linn County has done this over a matter of years, has developed this. I wanted to hand out a couple of departments and to give you an idea of the kinds of things that they put together for performance indicators. One is on the Board of Supervisors and the other is on a youth service peer group program. So it kind of gives you an idea of what we're talking about by these performance indicators, the input the output, the outcomes and the efficiencies. So when you begin looking at indicators for your own departments that this might be a guide. We're not saying that we have to do things like Linn county or Scott County. I think it's very appropriate to tailor things to Johnson County, but I think there is a lot of framework there that we can look to in putting this in place. Jonathan did you have anything?
Jordahl: We see this implementing performance-based budgeting as something that will involve a process over a period of time, at least 2 or 3 years to really get any kind of a working order that would resemble what Linn County has in the sheets that you have before you. But we already do have the beginnings of performance-based budgeting in place here, at least what you could construe to be performance-based budgeting in our functional budget. If you've seen the budget printout or looked through that you've got an object budget which is the one we've worked through as the Board of Supervisors in January looking line by line, how much is begin spent of personnel and how much is being spent on equipment and so forth. But there is another format to the budget presentation called the functional budget. I have a copy of this thing here in monster of course, but it does detail things according to the specific sub area functions of departments. Not in all cases. Some departments only have one functional classification, the Ambulance Department for example has one budgetary classification, ambulance service. But the County Attorney's office has a variety of different budget categories here. The first one listed is criminal prosecution, so they've got the expenses of personnel and so forth that go toward criminal prosecution outlined. They've got child support recovery as a separate category. What is missing to convert this into somewhat of a performance budget is for starters a correlation between the numbers of staff represented by those dollars and the dollars themselves and then on a production end of it, how many cases are dealt with. So the Attorney's office knows those numbers. They know how many full time equivalent staff they have, and they know how many cases they've dealt with. It wouldn't necessarily take a long and grueling process of statistics gathering over a period of years to formulate some performance standards that would begin to say how many cases has each attorney handled in that category this year? The County Attorney's office was gracious enough to provide me with some copies of a graph that shows the growth in their caseloads, but again does not correlate these numbers with the number of attorney's that are available to do the job. But again they know very well how many that is. If that were presented in the context of our budget report at budget time so we're sitting here in January looking at this we could see not only that there has been an increase in their caseloads, but we would be able to correlate that 5 years ago one criminal prosecuting attorney handled 50 cases a year, this last year they were required to handle 75 cases with no more attorneys, the ratio per attorney would be the same. We could also look at the cost trend. How much did it cost to handle one criminal prosecution on average over the course of any number of years. Some of these statistics we could probably generate out of historical information right now. We know how many full time equivalent people on staff, we probably have information if not on individual departments, and in some cases at the state level that were records were being kept of how busy our offices are. I don't know what to use for an example. How many licenses we may process for example. We may not have those numbers, maybe we do. But in some cases these numbers are being kept even without our keeping them. So I think we have some basic data that could take us a further step down the road to correlating the money that we're spending on services to people and the actual quantity of service that we're providing and the number of staff that are doing it. I think across the Board this is probably going to be advantageous to all departments to look at this and show that we're doing more with less than we've done in the past. It would be an argument for increasing budgets. I think it starts there. It's useful for departments to look at their own efficiency and make a case for their own budget. That's where I start with this thing. I think we can get something that begins to be performance based budgeting in the short term by using available information just reporting it in a slightly different fashion. Your correlating things that we are not now correlating. So one of the questions we'd want to ask is what kind of correlation's make sense for your department. What data are you now keeping for example? What do you keep track of already? Secondary Roads is an example of a department that keeps extensive track of what their employees are doing at any given time. I don't mean to suggest that performance-based budgeting would require that you all do that but that's information that already exists that could be correlated and we could look at efficiencies. How many miles of road, for example, how many miles of asphalt road were repaired using the budget that's actually delineated. This is for the repair of asphalt road, but the number of miles is not there in the budget to tell us what we actually bought for that money. So I don't know if Mike, does any of this make any sense to you in terms of how a budget might be improved?
County Engineer Mike Gardner: Sort of, I'm still a little fuzzy. I mean it depends on what you correlate it to I guess. The number of miles of road in Johnson County hasn't changed in over the last 30 years substantially.
Jordahl: Right. But the number of miles of asphalt road that you work on in any given year is variable with that year.
Gardner: Right.
Jordahl: Bridges, I mean how many bridges of what type were repaired, how much gravel... How many miles of gravel, how many tons of gravel put down on a particular section of road for example.
Gardner: We can look at that every year but why it might increase from one year to the next may be because of flooding in '93 or an increase in traffic since 1970. It's going to be difficult to pinpoint those types of things, but yes, I can kind of see where your...
Jordahl: Well this, this point up a problem with this too. I think if you've ever searched around on a computer and looked at maps where they have where you can see, well here is the entire United States, we can focus in on Iowa, or focus in on Johnson County and you can come right down and look at your driveway. Looking at how many tons of gravel were spread out on a one mile gravel road is more like looking for your driveway on that map. I think we can start down the road towards performance based budgeting by looking at here is this part of Johnson County, here is Johnson County, here are the total number of miles of gravel road that were... Total tons of gravel, total number of miles of gravel road that were dealt with. It doesn't tell you anything about any particular mile, but it does tell you something about the utilization of gravel and the trend. You can focus this at whatever level seems functional, useful, beneficial to your department and its process. The Board of Supervisors does not propose, at least as far as I know to tell you how to do that. But rather to suggest that this is a tool that you can focus, vary, build in your own way within your department to help things make sense and to help make the budget process more transparent for us.
Dvorak: Jonathan are you asking to eventually to go to the extreme of what it costs, time cost studies. I mean, I've been here for 35 and a half minutes. Are you going to eventually go to that extreme?
Jordahl: No I don't propose that. I guess as a department head would it be useful to you to go to that extreme and toss it back to your court?
Dvorak: I've done that in the past to qualify for new employees. That's about the only way I could do it, but on an annual basis it's not very productive, it doesn't really, it doesn't do anything. Now myself and I know Graham, we submit to the Board annual reports, which has basically everything we do from the previous year in it.
Stutsman: That's what we are finding, is that a lot of this stuff is already in place. What we need to do is standardize it across the County so that we're all getting the same kind of information and depending on the department, you know the departments need to decide for themselves what kind of information that they feel is relevant to their department. But just so that we're all tracking, so that we all are producing the same kind of information to make...
Dvorak: I like giving the Board and my other commissions an annual report, it brings me up to speed and what it also does is brings my records up-to-date too. The time cost studies have been very cumbersome. You almost have to have somebody on staff, if you have a larger department, just to do that. Like Secondary Roads, they basically have a time cost study of every job they do, they allocate certain numbers.
Dameron: I think a lot of us get into the reporting of statistics which are more of a process-type of objective and I think you want to go one step beyond that and look more at the outcome. A good example might say that we gave 65,000 immunizations during the year but the outcome is that we didn't have any cases of pertussis, which we do, but that would be the outcome versus the number of immunizations that we've provided.
Dvorak: Now you do do that don't you?
Dameron: Well we're working more toward that end. The other question I had Jonathan was in relationship to the major goals, would it be a good idea perhaps to focus in a little bit more on our strategic plan for the County?
Jordahl: Absolutely.
Dameron: So that you would have different entities working on the same goal which would be an overall objective with the consensus of all of us that are the major problems. I might be working on... It might be better for me to be working on transportation for the elderly than to look at a number of wells in Hills. I don't know, but...
Jordahl: Well this grows out of our own Boards strategic planning process. We have a meeting scheduled unless I'm wrong here...
Stutsman: ...November third.
Jordahl: Yes coming up just a little over a month on November third with all of you to do strategic planning. The idea of these goals, objectives, would be that it would be an outcome of your departmental strategic planning process. The Board has been doing this and I think it's part of our hope that we would come up with sort of a general goal for ourselves and for the County as a whole and that as we work together with all of you that we will come up with a way of articulating these goals as Graham is suggesting with the County vision as a whole and that your own department... Again I go back to the question of what do you want to make of this. My hope is that this is going to be useful to you. The idea of sitting down, it could be a useful process with all of the members of the department to say here is what we're about. Or what are we about, what do you feel like your about. It's more than a job description, it's more than what are the duties. What's your vision, what's your motivation? What are we trying to accomplish, what are we produce. What service do we provide to the public? What are they getting for their tax dollars? I mean that's a big part of this. It's not just can you justify the money to the Board of Supervisors, but when this comes out as a document the public can look at this and they can see this is what we're buying with our tax dollars. It's not how much was spent on salaries, oh gee that's too much. But it's to look at what services are we getting? I think that's a much better way to present the information. It says what your dollars are buying. Part of the process we want to go through here is to merge strategic planning with the budget process, so that we correlate the vision and the product with the dollars so that everything coheres and makes sense and everybody is involved in the process. That's the vision I think, it's not to require some kind of excessive detail in reporting from your office. It's not to make more paperwork for your department to make life more difficult but it's to help make things work. So my question is does it seem to you like there is something useful in this? Or am I mistaken in thinking that this might be useful to departments.
Whitney: Just one comment. I think that this helps you get away from the time study concept. Because that's really process oriented and Graham could say we're going to spend 2,000 hours delivering immunizations and that means a whole lot less to me than he says we gave 6,500 immunizations. Even that is what's real important is that it prevented these diseases. So I think it helps as a manager, because what you want is the outcome and people can get to that outcome within a variety of ways and as long as, then you can hope to reach that outcome (inaudible). What were you doing at this moment on this day?
Jordahl: This will work different in different departments. I mentioned the County Attorney's office a minute ago, where they may have 3 or 4 functional categories, and the goal may be to provide the service in some efficient way, some satisfactory way or it may be something more elevated, because a basic correlation that can be made between the number of staff as I suggested and the number of cases handled. Pat does the vision of how this might work go to more detail than that for you or do you want to stop there? Do you want to start cataloging how many minutes somebody spends doing any one thing?
White: No.
Jordahl: What would make sense in your department?
Carpenter: Hiring about 10 more people.
Jordahl: I'm sure it would.
Carpenter: Somebody to fill out the questionnaire.
White: I don't know... I have really mixed feeling about the concept. I think it has the potential to be a value, but it also has the potential to be a big waste of time and needs to be addressed very very carefully. In the ideal I'd like a lot more statistical information about my own department. But to generate very much more I would have to take something away from providing service. I think the key is to identify statistical reporting mechanisms that can be done fairly routinely without detracting from service, that's (inaudible). But we do keep some... Since you called me the other day and asked me if other statistical reporting records and I responded quickly no, a few others have occurred to me that we do now keep. We probably do more with the Information Services sorting assistance out of existing data. But an honest response is I'm kind of nervous about what I hear you folks taking about. We barely have enough time to answer the phone now and we're going to have to increase record keeping and data generation and one of the changes you made in your budget process last year that was a terrific was you let us speed it up by getting the only information that things were changed instead of generating all new information. If your going to fill that vacuum out by having us generate more information, we'll lose some ground. To be very clear, I don't say this critically, but this is experience in dealing with members of the Board of Supervisors and members of the Board of Health, which is a budget that I would say of all the budgets in the County would come the closest to a functionalized or a program-based budget. It's designed in the way it is because they have so many grants and they need to track spending in a way that is almost (inaudible). Without, I think Graham will understand, this is not a criticism of him, but that departmental budget is the one that is the most difficult for the public and the Board of Supervisors and his own governing board to understand. The sort of statistical report that you passed out, I didn't think of as program or performance budgeting when I started doing it, but one of the things that I said to myself when I became County Attorney was in order to equip me better to persuade the Board of Supervisors that I needed more staff or money or more space, I shouldn't just walk in and tell them that I need that, I need to generate some information that will help illustrate it. One of the things that is interesting about this particular report is that I've brought it to the Board every year at budget time and some years they've paid more attention to it than others and some years I emphasized it more than others, but I think it was helpful to me in trying to persuade the Board to add the staff positions that have been added. It's important that it's also probably half a dozen times a year we get calls from reporters who I generously characterize as representatives of the constituents that we're trying to serve, but in a real sense that they are and they're trying to do a story about Courthouse crowding or a new OWI law or my request for a new attorney and they say do you have any data that we could get our hands on to incorporate into the story, it would help illustrate this. We fax that report out to reporters probably half a dozen times a year. It comes in very handy to have it in the drawer that you can pull out and say well here, rather than having to meet with him for a couple of hours to answer questions or search for information. This is a very minor illustration, but it's one of the things I thought of after he spoke to me yesterday and I would want to preface it by saying that concepts of programs of performance budgeting probably change on occasion. They don't necessarily create measures and forever more give them great weight. One of the things that I did, this is pretty ancient history at this point but, when I was elected County Attorney in 1982 and did my very first appearance in front of the Board of Supervisors presenting a proposed budget, I said to them, one of the ways I want you to measure my success as County Attorney is Attorney retention. I gave them some statistics that showed at that point that Attorneys who came to work at the County attorney's office on an average stayed only a year and a half. I said I want to set as a goal that they'll be staying 3 or 4 years by the end of my first term. At this point most of them are staying well beyond that. That would be an example of the measurable goal that you could put into some form of analysis and then track it for however long you thought was important, or forever, if you wanted to. If you get to the Treasurers office, checking retention becomes meaningless, because everybody stays there forever.
Stutsman: It would look good though.
White: More people retire out of there and Secondary Roads than retire out of any office in the County, which says a lot about those 2 places to work. So retention isn't necessarily a meaningful measure for every department, but in the early to mid-eighties it was a very meaningful measure for us.
Redlinger: I concur with that, because when I came and started to work in the Treasurer's office, we have people come in and work about 6 months, get some experience, go to the University, because now we've got 6 months of experience and we can go out and get a hell of a lot better job then we can working in the Treasurer's office.
Stutsman: But Cletus, talking about your office, you told me the other day that you've been busier than you've ever been. I think that just getting that information to the Board, so then we can track that last year you did 1,000 licenses, this year you did 1,500. Then we can say, yes, Cletus needs another person down there. This is the trend we're seeing. We need to start planning accordingly. Things like that don't only affect the Treasurer's office though, I think they probably affect every office in the County.
Jordahl: But I wonder if in some ways, I was thinking about this to that the... Probably your office experiences this in growth, there is growth all over the County but I would guess that a lot of people that come in here don't buy houses, but they bring cars.
Redlinger: That's true. That's true.
Jordahl: That kind of differential is going to exist between departments. I still don't know what the reason was for being busy as we were this year in the Vehicle Department. As I told Sally the other day I've been here over 30 years and I've never seen a year like this. It has kind of slacked off a little bit now but it has really... It hasn't only been in this County. We've talked to some of the other surrounding counties, Linn, Muscatine, and some of those and they were all working overtime to get their jobs done. I didn't personally, but they worked overtime down there to get the work done.
Stutsman: Getting back to Pat's comment, I think the Board is real sensitive to putting a lot of additional work on department heads and acquiring a lot of information that we're not going to use. I think that's why the indicators have to come from the department heads themselves. What they think is important to track and not just getting a bunch of information together just to have statistics. So in that regard I think that we are interested in making a lot of extra work, but getting those things that really will help in the budgeting process and things.
Dameron: I think they're very helpful to sell your product to the taxpayer. I mean if you have some objectives and show that, I think they would understand why they are supporting for you because of these reasons. One of the nice things about the objectives if they're achieved is that it gives you a good sense of accomplishment through your department. I think the planning, that makes it worthwhile.
Mosher: I do like the idea of tying the goals to the budget, because in our department we have an ever increasing number of clients that we're trying to serve with a capped budget so we need to plan for that and we need to be able to adjust our budget figures for each of those consumer groups to the reality that the total number of people that we're going to serve and so it's helpful to plan in that way.
Stutsman: Steve did you have a comment?
Lacina: I apologize, but I'm going to have to leave. I've got a meeting over in Tipton with a couple of the Cedar County Supervisors but going back to the idea of this being a tool for the department heads, about in '88 or '89 we had an indigent defense case where we had to have a court appointed attorney. Our cost was $350,000 and the time that it took for that attorney to handle that murder case on Lower West Branch Road was immense, so if you look at the ratio of time for the Attorney, they may not have had a tremendous number of cases that they were able to handle, but it was an extremely important case versus somebody that's dealing with a lot of lesser types of cases. That's why it's important for you the department heads to give us suggestions of what are meaningful measurements and that may vary from department to department. But again it will help us in the defense of the taxpayers if they protest our budget and again it will give you tools to analyze the budget so we can make a better analysis of where we're at. Over the years compare where we're at. It may be in some cases very good if we can just hold our own given inflation and all of the different factors. We'll see bumps and cycles, but again it's meant as a tool to help you do a better job within the departments as well as us trying to figure out where we're at in terms of overall budget so... I don't think it's meant to be something that we're going to immediately come in and inflict on you or something like that. It's meant to be something that you can give us feedback and work for a good compromise. The other thing is basically as you go through this process talk to us, so we know as we set this us so we set it up correctly. We don't want to take one step forward and then 2 back. Thank you.
Lacina left at 3:20 p.m.
Stutsman: Thanks Steve. There's another handout I'm passing around and this is from Linn County's budget too and that gives you kind of some ideas of the different programs and some of the indicators that they've used in their programs that might be helpful when your putting together your indicators.
Dameron: What's your goal for this year?
Stutsman: I think we wanted to introduce this at the department head meeting and then maybe get together with the department heads in the near future and get feed back as far as indicators and where we want to go from here.
Jordahl: Yes, I think one thing to start with this year would be to ask what data do we already have, that doesn't require any additional data collection? Is to ask what do we already know? We know full time equivalents, we know how many people are served...
Stutsman: Kim was getting this information together before she left on each department. She had a brief synopsis of the programs and relevant statistics and maybe that's all we want to do this year and then maybe start looking towards putting together a mission plan and goals for the County and goals for each individual departments and having it just evolve from there. This will be a long process. This is not something that's going to happen over night and it's something that we're going to learn a lot along the way. We definitely want feedback from the department heads and from you.
Slockett: Sally, I've got a handout here, I have a few comments about.
Stutsman: OK.
Slockett: Jonathan asked me to make a few comments earlier. I read a study by the Government Finance Officers Association on performance budgets and this is a summary of that that I'll pass around. I'll just summarize a little bit. Performance-based budgeting has been around for a long time. As a matter of fact, in the number of counties and cities that primarily use performance, that use primarily a performance-based budget, is very small. But a survey of 550 budgets, about 60% of them contained some performance measures. This movement sort of came out of the pressure on government officials and the criticism of them and the challenging their credibility. They came out of Proposition 409 where there was a great movement began against governments raising taxes and the re-inventing government pressures that some jurisdictions have embraced and others have rebuffed, but there have been a lot of pro's and con's and pressures. What performance budgeting is designed to do is to link strategic planning goals and objectives of the County to the financial data in the budget. Performance budgeting is in fact the goal to make the budget the primary planning tool. It has been done very successfully and Sally was talking about the State forms that Human Services use. It communicates very well to non-professional public employees. It's a good tool of communication. The study showed a lot of things that I heard here today expressed by department heads, Pat White and others, and I'll just review the very bottom, the number 5 because I think these are important, that departments and agencies should play a key role in performance measures used. That's crucial if those departments are going to be held accountable for the performance program. This is a quote here. Because performance measurement, even if used sparingly can require significant resources, chief executive and administrative officers will have to rely heavily on departments to collect, maintain and report on performance data. So, on the one hand, we have to recognize this does take time, is what Pat was talking about. Next, departments are in the best position to develop performance indicators relevant to their programs and operations, because they know their departments best. Finally, the performance indicators used in the budget should be the ones developed for other purposes whenever possible. So what Jonathan said is right, to the extent that we can incorporate the measures that we actually use now in the budget and formalize it into the budget process, that's best, because those are the ones that we really needed or we really wouldn't have developed them in the first place. There are some other points summarized on this, but that's enough to spout off about right now.
Stutsman: Any questions or comments? Duane?
Lewis: (Inaudible) when do you want this submitted, as an addendum of our budget, or do you want (inaudible), or verbally... Or should it come as a packet with budget, in the past you didn't have a lot of time, you were under the gun then, didn't have time to absorb it (inaudible). So how do you want us to get to... Let's just assume that we just give you what we have at this point and the rest of these, when do we submit it and in what form?
Jordahl: Well we were talking about a strategic planning process. Had it not been for the immediately, the last topic we had here on the personnel review, we were talking about a 2 week time frame to get together again to sit down and talk about these things, after you get a good chance to digest this material, think about it, what would actually be a few low stress for you to collect data, maybe you actually already got the data, they would actually be useful indicators of performance in your departments, and come back in a couple of weeks and sit down and talk about that. Then November 3rd, is it? Or 2nd we've got the strategic planning meeting again with the department heads set up. So we're looking at maybe setting up a budget meeting, sort of a goals and objectives, reasonable measures, kind of discussion/work session in a couple of weeks. Then we go to the strategic planning session to talk about how this fits into a vision for the office in early November. See what we come up with. Not necessarily to... I don't have a vision now of exactly what's going to be the outcome of this, but to chew on it and see what would be reasonable. Is it reasonable for us to get together in 2 weeks?
Stutsman: Do we want to piggy back on the 8th? The meeting of the 8th? And have a session after that... After the salary survey if that's already on the calendar?
Dameron: Think that will take an hour?
Stutsman: I don't know how long that will take.
Mosher: It would be easier this being once instead of twice.
Stutsman: Yes, why don't we tentatively do that, the same basic format we've had here, salary study first and then go into a budget discussion or something. OK.
Jordahl: Well it's going to be a long meeting, what are we setting aside for that?
Stutsman: Probably 2 hours again.
Bolkcom: Maybe we can do refreshments for that meeting.
Jordahl: Yes, I think we'd better.