ESRI Executive Leadership Seminar
August 3, 2008
Thank you very much for inviting me to join you.
I especially want to thank Jack Dangermond and everyone at ESRI for the remarkable partnership between Maryland and ESRI that stretches back many years.
There are very few people in this world whose talents and insights have the sort of widespread impact on management and governance that Jack has had with the rapid evolution and embrace of GIS -- it will prove, I believe, to be a lasting impact that strengthens the vitally important relationship between citizens and their government, maybe even between this generation and the next,…
Thanks to the remarkable work being done by Jack Dangermond and his professional progeny around the world, we’ve reached a point in our human history where we’re now able to change the course of a city’s history, a state’s history, a nation’s history … house-by-house, block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood – and yes, neighbor by neighbor
…Such is the power of this merger of mapping with the coordination of human effort,… To heal an entire ecosystem by mapping and pinpointing every parcel, every square mile, every peak and valley, field and stream, farm and forest – all of the otherwise disparate places and actions that, coordinated together, form one set of green lungs that our state needs in order to breathe and survive as a desirable place to live.
As today we stand at our own cutting edge of history, GIS is more than just a nice technology – it is a quantum technical advance in the effectiveness of self-governance and self-determination. It is a powerful and transparent new tool for progress provided we are unafraid of setting goals, and unafraid of openly measuring the performance of our public institutions and efforts. Unafraid of what Robert Kennedy called “the rational application of human effort to human problems.”
For central to all of this is what you do every day at ESRI – what many of us have come to San Diego to talk and share ideas about on this August afternoon -- using geography and mapping to organize, coordinate, and above all hold accountable hundreds and thousands of individual actions that together allow us to make progress for the common good.
Serving the people of the great State of Maryland as their Governor, and also having served the people of the great City of Baltimore as their Mayor, I am more convinced than ever of the indispensable importance of these principles and mapping technology to the cause of progress.
I wanted to spend our time together this afternoon talking about our experience in Maryland, and as I do so I’d like you to consider the answer to this question – why is it that virtually any display of GIS technology quickly inspires someone one to ask the timeless question, “…Can you show me my house?”
Show me my house. We’ll come back to that,…
Setting Goals
Before we talk about mapping and geography, let’s talk about shared beliefs and the shared goals that flow from them in a community.
In other words, what are we trying to accomplish? Where are we going, and how do we know we’re getting there? These are timeless human questions. If as Toynbee writes “man progresses in response to adversity,” these are the very questions that provoke progress. These are questions Moses no doubt heard asked of him time and again by the Israelites throughout their 40 years in the desert.
If we believe in concepts like “the common good”, if we believe in individual worth and the individual right to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, if we believe that individual actions make social progress possible, then a certain mission statement emerges for a free people.
With American Revolutionary flare, Franklin Roosevelt lead our country in the community of the world with the beautiful simplicity of the Four Freedoms: The first, he proclaimed, is freedom of speech and expression,… everywhere in world. The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,…everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want,…everywhere in the world. And the fourth is freedom from fear – anywhere in the world.
In leading the State of Maryland, our stated goals are:
- To strengthen and grow the ranks of our middle class, our family owned businesses and family farms,
- To improve public safety and public education in every region of our State .
- To expand opportunity – the opportunity to learn and earn, the opportunity to enjoy the health of the people we love and the environment we love to more people rather than fewer.
When leading the City of Baltimore -- in the face of some very serious challenges -- our clearly stated and pursued goals were
- to make Baltimore a safer, cleaner, healthier place
- to make our City a better place for children to grow up
- to make our City a better place where businesses invest and grow
“Show me my house,...”
You see, when we were handed the keys to the 16,000 person, $2 billion a year operation known as the Baltimore City Government, we inherited our fair share of challenges. Some of them very, very big challenges.
For starters, we were battling one of the highest violent crime rates and one of the highest addiction rates in the nation. And after 30 years of the biggest population loss of any major City in America, we had fewer residents and less revenues with which to combat our problems. Too often this left us a legacy of underperforming schools, underperforming and unresponsive city services, littered streets and alleys, thousands of vacant buildings and vacant hearts.
Our citizens voted for change, and they knew that our City’s survival depended on that change coming about as quickly as possible – which brings me to:
Performance Measurement
Those of us in the public sector tend to be very good at measuring “inputs.” For example, we ask “what’s the funding level for environmental protection?” But less often do ask, “how much nitrogen are we keeping out of this particular waterway this month versus last month?”
When our new City Administration rolled up our sleeves and got to work, we found that there was really very little in city government that was being measured in a timely, accurate, or real-time manner. Information was often being collected but rarely, if ever, was that information being shared with all or even shared with managers and executives – it is impossible to steer or speed a ship without a compass or controls.
At that important threshold we were guided by another talented and visionary Jack, Jack Maple, who was one of the key pioneers under Commissioner Bratton behind the highly successful ComStat program put to use by the New York Police Department. We felt that if the NYPD could so successfully use computer pin-mapping to put crimes on the map and deploy cops to the dots and thereby improving public safety, then data collection and mapping technology could work for everything else that government does.
Relentless Follow-Up and Examples of Progress
Now, data collection and gis mapping without action, of course, is pointless. That’s why Jack Maple’s Comstat tenets immediately became our four basic tenets of Citistat: timely accurate information shared by all, rapid deployment of resources, effective tactics and strategies, and relentless follow-up and assessment.
But to drive progress and build trust with our public, we started doing something revolutionary – we started geo-mapping every conceivable service, problem, and opportunity so we could measure outcomes and performance, not once a year, but every day. Why? Because a map doesn’t know whether a neighborhood is black or white, or rich or poor, or Democratic or Republican, but it does know where our problems and opportunities are, and we deployed our resources accordingly. And we made progress, for all, together.
We have a couple examples for you of these strategies in action – and how mapping played an important role as the standard gauge of railroad track on which the trains of progressive action were made to run in concert and movement together. If we can get the first slide (kidneys of death slides) we have an example of how we applied the principles of performance based government and used geo-mapping to tie the disparate pieces together.
These kidney shaped red areas on this slide from 1999 show three clouds representing the most deadly areas of our city. By using mapping to target and concentrate resources to the most crime challenged areas -- block-by-block, street-by-street we were able to chip-away each year. Can we see the next few slides please? By using mapping to deploy our resources strategically, the kidneys got smaller and smaller. And by the time we left office, violent crime was down 40%, its lowest level in four decades.
Let’s see another example, shall we? (Project 5000 slides) As people abandoned our City, they left behind them fifteen thousand vacant homes. But from this challenge also came opportunity, in the form of vast potential for redevelopment. Through the power of mapping, we were able to create our city’s first-ever complete inventory of housing stock including the ownership information that could be used and accessed by mangers of boarding and cleaning crews, by those responsible for policing, those responsible for inspections, those responsible for filing the lien on the property after cleaning, those in the city’s housing department responsible for clearing title, and taking title, and those responsible for disposing of title so the property could be redeveloped and returned to the tax rolls.
“Show me my house,…”
Mapping showed us where we had opportunities to strategically target our scarce demolition dollars, and where to begin to assemble and clear lots to sell to private or nonprofit developers to create new, living neighborhoods. In a shrinking City that for decades had never bothered to take title and awaken deaden capital, we ultimately acquired 5,900 properties over just a few years time.
Among our other successes:
- We were able to back up with 98% success, a 48-hour guarantee to address complaints from citizens about potholes. (slide)
- We were able to reduce by 65% the number of children poisoned by dangerous levels of lead. (slide)
- We were able to reduce what had been an eight month wait for a citizen complaint to clean and board a vacant house, to a mere 14 days.
While some may scoff at attacking potholes, crime, trash and grime, we believed – and continue to believe -- that there are some basic aspirations shared by all of humanity. There is no Democratic or Republican way to fill a pothole, no political ideology to picking up illegally dumped garbage, to removing graffiti, to cleaning an alley. And all children regardless of their parents party affiliation, deserve a healthy start, a decent home, and a place to play where they don’t have to dodge hypodermic needles or bullets.
With goals, performance measures, and mapping, we were able to empower our citizens to reverse four decades of what had been seemingly insurmountable population loss, and the city started growing again. And under my successor, Mayor Dixon, the progress continues and so does Citistat. On a year to date basis, Baltimore today is achieving her biggest reduction in homicides in 30 years,…
In the past year and half we’ve been implementing these same performance measurement and mapping strategies statewide in Maryland.
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