Last month, the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, recognized Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett as an “Innovator in Action,” publishing on its website a thesis by Bartlett that described how he tackled “fiscal challenges” during his first year in office “by embracing innovation, competition and market-based policies.”
Bartlett’s article, “Tulsa: Open for Business,” illustrates how he used private sector experience as an oil-and-gas man to overhaul city government—from his first day in office, through an independent audit of city services, up to now, as recommendations from the audit are being implemented and managed.
An excerpt:
My first day in office was December 7, 2009. My finance director greeted me with the sober news that, after ten consecutive months of declining sales tax revenues, all previous measures to balance the city budget had failed to stop the real threat of deficit spending. Even though the previous administration had cut $10 million dollars in spending and had used almost $11 million of the reserve fund, my management team and I had 45 days to cut an additional $10 million from the operating budget. In total, this amounted to between 10% and 15% or $24 million of the operating budget.
Reductions by the previous mayor had included discontinuing public safety academies, turning off highway lights, grounding the police helicopters, and suspending the removal of graffiti and the mowing of public property. Even with city employees being furloughed eight days and the previous administration having spent 80% of the city’s reserve fund after just five months of the fiscal year, more and bigger pain was on the immediate horizon. Defaulting on obligations was more real than at any time in Tulsa’s history.
We quickly discerned that the city government had not prepared for times such as these. City government had grown too big, it cost too much, it was doing too much, and it had made commitments and promises to our government employee unions that could not be kept.
[…]
With the help and guidance of my chief of staff and management team we have accomplished major changes after only two years. Over that time Tulsa has resumed both police and fire academies, the police helicopters are flying again, the highway lights are back on and the efforts toward mowing public property and removing graffiti have doubled. All of the employee furlough days have been eliminated, and for the first time in several years, the employees received a stipend increase in June. The reserve fund balance has been restored to almost $13 million and we continue to control our overhead cost by maintaining a 3% vacancy rate across all city departments. And, for the first time in memory, the city has reached collective bargaining agreements with all five of its bargaining units at the beginning of the fiscal year.
Leonard Gilroy, director of government reform for the Reason Foundation, said the Innovators in Action series is a monthly opportunity for “innovative public sector leaders to discuss the what, why, and how of their reforms in their own words.”
Gilroy said Tulsa had been on his radar for a while, but when KPMG’s independent audit of city services came out in 2010, he began to investigate what was happening in Tulsa and saw the city—and Bartlett’s leadership of it—as “compelling evidence of the type of innovation you can do when you do more with less.”
Gilroy specifically cited the city’s public-private partnerships in managing the city animal shelter and the Tulsa Zoo, as well as the managed competition model of providing services, as examples of action other city leaders can take to improve efficiency in times of fiscal uncertainty.
“It’s about getting into the weeds of government and asking, ‘Is the way we’ve been delivering things the most efficient way, or can we dig down deep in our pockets and apply new ways to streamline services, improve efficiency, and bring down costs?’” Gilroy said. “If you pack all those things together, like Mayor Bartlett did, that’s impressive for any mayor. What’s really impressive is he’s only in his third year as mayor. That shows someone who is aggressive at embracing reform while being attentive to what works and delivering services.”
Gilroy wrote, in an introduction to Bartlett’s article: “It is our hope that that the examples and experiences offered by innovators like Mayor Bartlett will inspire reform-minded mayors and administrators elsewhere to provide better, leaner and cheaper government to taxpayers.”
—Holly Wall, News Editor
