Auditor urges small, measurable steps toward outcome‑based performance reporting

The City Auditor presented 'A Guide to Measuring Performance in the City of Berkeley,' an information report that recommends a framework for developing outcome‑oriented performance measures, standardizing reporting periods and publishing comparable metrics in the city budget or online dashboards.

Auditor staff highlighted common practices used by peer cities, recommended beginning with one or two measures per department that can be consistently tracked over time, and advised against starting with measures that would require creating new data collection systems. The report included examples from IT, Parks, Recreation & Waterfront and Police and recommended phased adoption aligned to departmental capacity.

Councilmembers generally praised the guidance and favored an incremental approach. Councilmember Blackaby emphasized starting with a small set of 'critical few' indicators that are meaningful to residents, while the City Manager said departments were already working on outcome measures and that the proposed approach could build on existing work.

The auditor and council discussed implementation tradeoffs in a constrained budget environment: staff time to develop measures must be balanced against delivery of services. The auditor recommended focusing on existing data that can be reported and keeping measures consistent across years to show trends.

Next steps: Council supported moving the item forward for committee consideration and directed staff and the auditor to collaborate on identifying an initial set of cross‑cutting and department‑level measures to be reported in upcoming budget materials.