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to The Media and Community DevelopmentFrom Measures and Milestones: The Conference Proceedings
pp. 59-75, published 1997
Daniel Hall, Assistant to the President for University Relations, oversees governmental and public relations for the University of Louisville. He is an attorney with experience in private practice specializing in corporate law and has seven years of legislative and political experience working in Washington as top assistant to former Congressman Ron Mazzoli. Mr. Hall currently serves on the Boards of Directors of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center, the Kentucky Center for Public Issues, and the Public Radio Partnership. Dan has a keen interest in the areas of education, law, and civil rights. He is an alumnus of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School.
Dr. Tom Forsythe has spent 19 of his 23 years with the Tennessee Valley Authority working in Kentucky. His primary interest is in helping promote sustainable development. Dr. Forsythe has worked in natural resources management and research, environmental education, and economic development. He played a key role in the United Nations establishing the Mammoth Cave Area and Land Between The Lakes Area Biosphere Reserves in 1990 and 1991. After serving in Southeast Asia with the Air Force, Dr. Forsythe received his bachelors from St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1972. Upon receiving an EPA Fellowship, he went on to receive his Masters in Fisheries Science in 1973 and his doctorate in environmental science in 1978, both from Michigan State University. Dr. Forsythe enjoys cooking and visiting his lake retreat in northern Minnesota with his wife Nancy.
Dr. Betty S. King is part of the Pulaski County Visioning Steering Team and is serving as principal investigator for the Kettering Foundation field research project on the Pulaski County Visioning process. She is wrapping up her 15 years as a Pulaski County Extension Agent for Home Economics. Starting in January, she will be assuming responsibilities as Extension Specialist in Rural Economic Development with the University of Kentucky.
Jeanette Rogers is a native of Eastern Kentucky and has spent several years working in rural community development, both as a volunteer and as staff. She is currently a MACED employee in the Sustainable Communities Initiative, serving as Director of Community Development for the Owsley County Action Team. She has a BA from Lincoln Memorial University and in the past has worked as a paralegal, literacy coordinator, and also as regional coordinator for the Prichard Committee. She and her son, Sam, live in Booneville, Kentucky.
René F. True was appointed the Director of the Division of Research in the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development in September 1995. Mr. True served three and one half years as Deputy Secretary of the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet. He was twice elected Fayette County Property Valuation Administrator. Mr. True has owned and managed rental property, been a partner in a commercial real estate firm, operated his own seminar business, and currently represents a Lexington real estate firm as principal auctioneer. Mr. True graduated from the University of Kentucky with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree and received his MBA degree from the University of Kentucky in December 1995. He is a Kentucky licensed real estate broker and principal auctioneer. He received the Certified Kentucky Assessor (CKA) and Senior Kentucky Assessor (SKA) designations from the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet. Mr. True has presented real estate, appraisal, property tax and management seminars and courses for the International Association of Assessing Officers, Illinois Property Assessment Institute, Lexington Community College, North Carolina Institute of Government, Kentucky Revenue Cabinet, realtors, appraisers, private real estate schools, and others. He has authored several professional articles and given numerous presentations to state and national conferences. He is married to Renee True and they have two sons: Brandon, 14, and Bradley, 9.
Moderator, Daniel Hall:
I’m Assistant to the President at the University of Louisville . . . welcome to this session. It is entitled, "Why measuring progress is key and how to choose indicators." As one of the most recently appointed members of the Long-Term Policy Research Center Board, I’m delighted and indeed honored to be a participant in this important conference.
As the new millennium approaches, many of us are involved, have been involved, or will become involved in strategic planning for our organizations, businesses, or governmental entities, attempting to chart a course for survival or prosperity in the 20th century. Thanks to the distinguished presenters we have on our panel today, you will come to understand, I hope, more astutely the importance of having measures of progress which is perhaps the most important element of any strategic plan. As was emphasized in the book Reinventing Government by Osborne and Gabler, if you don’t measure results, you can’t distinguish success from failure. But, perhaps more importantly, measuring something or keeping count has the intrinsic value of prompting people to respond, ideally, to react to a charge by working toward a specific goal.
That generally happens to us as human beings when we keep count of anything. So, having measures of progress really facilitates human action and human involvement. Unless we effectively measure the results of our efforts, we rarely achieve our goals, which raises the second part of the question presented to our panelists today. How do we choose the most appropriate and useful indicators as measures of progress? Real measures of progress must focus on outcomes as opposed to outputs or amounts of efforts or resources invested toward achieving goals. So there is a clear distinction between outcomes and outputs and hopefully we’ll get a sense of that today.
Fourteen months ago I was asked by Jefferson County Commissioner Darrell Owens to lead a citizens’ grassroots effort to develop a strategic plan for the African-American community in Jefferson County. We have been working on this plan to develop a comprehensive strategic plan, which will advance our community in three specific areas: educational attainment, economic development, and health and wellness. And, after months of conducting research, consulting with experts, establishing goals, and holding public hearings, we are now at the stage in our strategic planning process of choosing measures of progress, selecting quantifiable benchmarks which will mark our progress towards achieving some admittedly ambitious goals.
So it is with great interest that I look forward to hearing and learning from our distinguished presenters here today. Since you have the bios of each of the presenters in your packets, I won’t take valuable time to introduce them. Suffice it to say that each has been involved in some community or organizational strategic planning process, and each has a different degree of experience or perspective in developing measures of progress for their respective planning efforts. I will introduce each panelist in the order each will present. Each will speak for approximately 10 minutes and hopefully that will leave sufficient time for some meaningful questions and answers at the end of this session.
The first to speak will be Dr. Tom Forsythe. He works as an economic development specialist for TVA. His area of responsibility includes 26 counties in western and south central Kentucky. He works with Chambers of Commerce, mayors, and county judges in these areas to help with strategic planning, leadership development, and team building. He lives in Marshall County and has an office in a paradise known as Land Between the Lakes. We also learned this morning that he makes a hell of a gumbo. Dr. Betty King works with the Pulaski County visioning steering team. She serves as Principle Investigator for the Kettering Foundation Field Research Project in Pulaski County and she serves as the Pulaski County Extension Agent for Home Economics. Jeanette Rogers works as Director of Community Development for the Owsley County Action Team. She is involved in the Sustainable Community Initiative and lives in Booneville, Kentucky. And last, René True serves as the Director of the Division of Research in the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. He lives in Lexington and has day-to-day operation responsibility for the Kentucky Strategic Plan for Economic Development. So with that, I will turn over the discussion to our first presenter, Dr. Forsythe.
Dr. Forsythe:
Thank you . . . I’m the person that made the gumbo that made me famous in Simpson County, and that’s my only claim to fame, probably. As I won a state cooking contest in 1986, I was going to go for the gusto and try to win a national cooking contest in Nebraska the next August, about eight months later. I experimented all winter long and found out that if you use fresh okra, garlic, parsley, thyme, and oregano, plus freshly caught crappie out of Kentucky Lake and not frozen, it tasted a whole lot better. So I decided, if I’m going to win this $10,000 first prize, I’m going to grow all my own tomatoes, okra, thyme, and even my garlic. Then I went up to Nebraska a week early and had all these fresh vegetables out of my garden air expressed up there. I vacationed a week in Minnesota; the only cheating I did was I caught the crappie in Minnesota and I called the recipe Kentucky Lake Crappie Gumbo.
I went to the convention center in Nebraska. The contest was supposed to be a big thing and nobody was there; the national contest was canceled and I was the only state representative that didn’t get the message because I left a week early. It was on my answering machine when I got home. I’d gone to all this trouble to get all these things flown up there and apparently it was a scam. It was supposed to bring so many thousands of people to the community and when the Chamber checked the motel bookings and found there was nobody coming to it, they backed out of their $10,000 first prize and it fell through. But I am the state champion cook in Kentucky.
I work for the Tennessee Valley Authority. It’s a federal agency broadly defined with a mission to uplift the economy of the Tennessee Valley Region. TVA is also a large producer of electricity, and its original mission has in reality been replaced by the new corporate business of primarily producing electricity. It has kind of forgotten about some of its original charges for business reasons. With deregulation of the electric utilities coming and competition, it seems—and this is my only joke today—that TVA doesn’t know whether it has found a rope or lost a horse.
I’m an ecologist by training, and I know there are two other ecologists in the room, believe it or not: Dr. Bill Martin, who is now a politician with state government, more or less, and Steve Bourne who is a City Planner in Hopkinsville, an ecologist by training in wildlife ecology from Murray State University. So, I don’t know how many others here are ecologists but I’ll bet probably none. Ecologists are the ones who study and track the health of ecosystems, and I presently work in the area of economic and community development, which is a far cry from the 16 years of studying Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley while I worked at Land Between the Lakes.
I still work at Land Between the Lakes, but I work in the area of economic and community development in the counties surrounding Land Between the Lakes. I know of many similarities between the functioning of towns as systems and the functioning of a lake as a system. I find working with communities as human ecosystems is by far more challenging than working with the Kentucky Lake ecosystem. For lakes, ecologists have many management goals for maintaining long-term health and well-being. The goals all point towards maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem. Ecologists know that healthy ecosystems are those that are resilient to change, which means when perturbed they can bounce back from catastrophes such as a pollution causing a fish kill.
Ecologists know that a healthy ecosystem has a diversity of plant and animal populations and that it has many different species to fill a variety of niches or habitats. Yet, there must be no overcrowding by any one particular species. We ecologists hold sacred the notion that diversity begets stability of the ecosystem at large and that population monopolies by any single species cause the ecosystem to crash.
You can see where I’m going with all this. If I had more time, I’d try to build a case that a biological ecosystem such as Kentucky Lake is very similar to a human ecosystem such as Somerset, Kentucky. Kentucky Lake, though, is different from Lake Cumberland and therefore it must be managed differently. Somerset is different from Hopkinsville; therefore it must be managed differently, also. Or, does it really matter that there are differences? Maybe there are certain indicators of healthy ecosystems that apply to all ecosystems, whether it’s a tiny quarter-acre pond or 170,000-acre lake. Maybe for Somerset, for Hopkinsville, for Danville, and for Lexington, there are common indicators of healthy, vibrant, resilient communities.
Back to Kentucky Lake for a minute, take the problem caused by nutrient enrichment from fertilizers or sewage, nutrification. The indicators of nutrient enrichment are many; one could measure phosphorous and nitrogen concentrations to get an indicator of the degree of runoff coming from lawns, fertilizers, or fertilizers off fields. You could measure the quantity of plankton in the water in the form of algae cells, which can multiply, overcrowd, and cause lots of problems when you have high concentrations of phosphorous or nitrogen. Both these require lengthy laboratory procedures so they’re indicators that cost money. More simply you could just take a water sample and look at it under the microscope for certain types of species that are indicators of problems such as blue-green algae species that only occur when you have excess nutrient loading in the form of human sewage or animal feces. Ecologists use indicators all the time to try to assess the health of the ecosystem.
And, just as there are a multitude of indicators for measuring the health of an ecosystem, there are a number of indicators that can be used to indicate the health of a community or the status of its quality of life. That’s what this conference is about: how you determine where you are going in a community and what progress you’re making. Many cities and towns today are now trying to get a handle on measuring the status of the quality of life, to develop indicators to track communities over time. The first successful venture of this that I ran across was in 1992 when the Sustainable Seattle Initiative was published. They got about 30 people together and came up with 20 indicators that could be tracked to look at the long-term health and vitality of Seattle in cultural, economic, environmental, and social contexts. These 20 indicators were later expanded to 40 indicators. Some states have done this.
Kentucky is one of them to come up with a set of indicators for the health of the state at large. Minnesota Milestones and Oregon Benchmarks have done it. The more I tried to get a handle on indicators, benchmarks, and measures, I got confused because there are some people that say there’s a difference. I started looking at social capital, civic participation, citizen involvement, and capacity building, and read Robert Putnam who distinguishes between social capital and citizen engagement and I thought they were all the same; it was all just another word for volunteerism to me. I got confused.
I haven’t been doing this capacity building thing all that long. I do work with some TVA Quality Community Initiatives, so I’ve spent 20 years doing ecology and two years doing community development. I’m kind of confused about how it is all supposed to work. I’ve seen it work in Simpson County—Nancy Stone talked about it—and I’ve seen it work in Fulton County, but I’ve seen it fail in my own county, Marshall County. I can’t tell you for sure what causes it to fail; I do know that the media needs to be involved. Nancy Stone came from a media background and she knew the importance of media. She had all types of media—radio, TV, newspaper—plugged into the process and there were media that served on the quality council. In Fulton it’s working and Rita Mitchell, editor of the newspaper, is talking right now next door. It’s working there because the media was involved. I’m not sure why it works and why it doesn’t work, but it’s not working in the county that I thought I could get it to work in the easiest because I was most enthused about seeing it work there. There’s apathy and complacency, and we held several town meetings. You’ve heard people say they get 300-400; we got maybe 15 people to come to four different meetings—an average of four or five each meeting.
I’m still interested in how an ecosystem functions as related to communities and when I went to the Economic Development Institute in Oklahoma, I borrowed an overhead from Dr. Leo Presley who spoke at the graduation. He talked about ecosystems and economics and I never got to talk to him afterwards. He just brought it up and I want to explore that further. This shows a pyramid. Ecologists deal in pyramids, food webs, and chains, and they have a predator at the top and primary herbivores going up. Well, here’s an economic ecosystem that has at the base workforce blocks, infrastructure, and leadership development, and then at the top is industrial development.
In some places, that seems to be the most important. At least in TVA it is because we are about to drop this quality community program probably because it cannot clearly show that it leads to jobs and selling electricity. It’s unfortunate that a capacity-building program like this is getting some national recognition and is very likely to be scrapped by TVA within the year, but other people will be using it in other agencies and other organizations, I guess. After using it for 15 years, we did not have the indicators in place and we could not show clearly that it has led to things like jobs that economic developers and government agencies seem to be more interested in than civic engagement and capacity building.
I maintain that the base of that pyramid is more important than the top; it is what the whole visioning capacity building effort is. It needs to be integrated into all those blocks. At the bottom is the first step and then the next step and then you jump up to the vision and then the gap in between is the volunteerism, the capacity building, the action, and everything to fill in where things need to be done. I am from Minnesota and Garrison Keeler says, "Powder milk biscuits give shy people the strength to do what needs to be done" and I’m a shy person and I’ve seen this quality community program give communities the strength, the energy, and the want to fill in the gap between that space. Thank you.
Dr. King:
I’m located here in Somerset with the Pulaski County Extension Service. I’d like to share with you a little bit of the Pulaski County visioning experience and some of the lessons learned. Maybe instead of answering the question "Why should we have indicators of success?" I guess I would ask more questions because I have some real concerns about how we frame those indicators of success. A few weeks ago, at this very Center, we had a program on community issues and a panel from Somerset who had been leading the forums and are part of the steering committee. During the forum someone asked me where we were in the visioning process, and I said, "I really don’t know" and I’d say that jokingly. But I was serious in one way in that, as many of you have been involved in this process know, it is a journey; sometimes you really don’t know where you are going, but we have a sense of where we are going in Pulaski County.
A lot of people have been involved in the visioning process; Lori Garkovich and many people from UK and locally helped us design the program once we initially decided we wanted to do it. We started in 1995, training group moderators who then went out and led forums. We had over 400 people involved in the community. If you’ve been involved in visioning processes and you’re like I was when this came about, you’ll understand that I was really reluctant to be involved because I think I had served on every visioning committee in existence and was getting kind of tired. I was beginning to think I was hallucinating rather than visioning about where things needed to go. In talking with Lori and Tom Ilvento at the time they needed an extension person to be involved, I said, "I really don’t want to do it unless we do it right." To me, doing it right meant not doing another plan that went back on the shelf and collected dust.
As circumstances would have it, we had a wonderful opportunity to follow up our visioning forum with a series of forums, partly supported by local government as well as the Kettering Foundation, bringing back the information people said to the moderators. We have learned a tremendous amount of information about a community and how the process can work in communities. After we did the training, Lori compiled the information and we presented it back to the original group which was our Economic Development Council. We had city government, county government, our economic group, the Chamber, and Extension Office involved and the Chamber has really been the lead group to really drive the force. I’ve been a partner in that in terms of connecting some of the university resources.
So, after we did the training and Lori compiled the information, we brought the moderators back together for a second round asking people if they would be willing to go back to their same group and share the information. And we developed a booklet of information that had the visioning results as well as a document that had everybody’s comments. It was really fascinating to me in that I wasn’t sure people would come back and most people did. One person even said, "This whole process gave us permission to talk about what’s important in our community," and I thought that was very interesting that we have to give ourselves permission to talk about what’s important to us in our community. Several of us worked together on the booklet. I’m very pleased and I do have a limited number of copies for you.
We tried to reframe the issues in terms of a similar model, the National Issues Forum model, which presents information from more than one perspective. When people came back to have the discussion, they could present the information but also ask challenging questions. We ended up with three overall issues which seem to be pretty typical of most visioning processes. The major themes dealt with broad areas: land use, better cooperation between city and county government, and community services. We framed the question under each of those. We encouraged groups to take at least one of those three themes and talk about them in depth and we wrote some consequences of not acting and consequences of acting to get people talking about the issues.
One of the fascinating things I learned from this process is how we talked for years about land use being a problem, zoning and so forth, but going through the process people actually name the problem in terms. The vocabulary made it safe to start talking about the real issue of land use in Pulaski County, and for years that has been a very debatable issue. It made it safe for citizens, the mayors, the county judge—key people in the community—to come together and have an in-depth study of land use, which Lori led, looking at what the law was and the different approaches to land use. I think that would be one successful indicator that came out of that. People then had their discussions and a lot of things have spun off from that. I’ll go over what I think some of the successes were.
I have a real good group of friends that keep me grounded. I was telling about what we were going to do and I asked, "What would be a good indicator of community success?" A friend jokes, "Have people look at front porches and fences to see how well your community is doing." We laughed at that but maybe there are different levels of indicators for success and visioning, and maybe the first level of indication is just people involvement. Look at the front porches in our community to see if people are engaged and are they waving at each other as they walk down the street? How are the fences? Are they strong or broken or high or low between different communities?
One thing we started looking at to figure out if we were being successful, and which we think is an indicator of success for our project in Somerset, has been local action projects. We have a large county. Pulaski is one of the largest counties, and we had local groups that started projects. One group in the far eastern part of the county, Mount Victory, has started some tourism efforts based on a park there. One part of the county has formed a concerned citizen’s group and they are starting a park and renovating the old school. They are spinning off some other projects. We are now doing a "community that plays together, stays together" project looking at planning parks across the county in a more unified way. We are also looking at better governmental cooperation, and I know there are a lot of definitions of what that really means. But for the first time in the history of the county, the mayors of all the little local communities came together and looked at land use as a broad community.
We’ve formed a futures committee, trying to pull together all the smaller communities together with our project. Some other projects have been more awareness of what’s going on and a sense of pride in our community, just to name two. So part of it is the different levels of what community really means to you in terms of what’s happening. One of the things about the visioning process that we forget is the people who are involved and the impact that it has on people in our community. Just so you can see these are real people, we had 27 forums that ranged from volunteer fire departments—we have 14 volunteer fire departments in Pulaski County—to interagency groups. It has been really interesting for me to see how this model could actually encourage institutional change in our communities because one of the things we found is that people really are searching for a model or a pattern to talk about things that are important to them.
One community is 18 miles out, but they have a festival and have one of the oldest historical educational systems. A lot of the forums were held in homes. One was an extension club program that was particularly interested in going to see how the fiscal court operates. So we have not only had some of the successes with the land use and local action projects, but also increased use of community networks. We listed in the back of the book community resources, so we find a lot of people are just not aware of what resources they have in the community. We felt like that has been a resource that we connected different groups together. So, maybe in the first level of indicators, just getting a way for people to be involved in a community to look at a new way of having conversations about important issues in our community has really opened the door for some future indicators of success. We are really looking beyond a one- or two-year project and we are technically in our second year. I’ll be glad to entertain some questions.
Ms. Rogers:
I work with the Owsley County Action Team. We actually formed in 1992 and the first thing we did was develop a diversion study. As part of that study we decided on things we thought would help our county grow. At the same time, we developed our mission statement, which is "To provide the leadership to enable the citizens of Owsley County to achieve self-empowerment, sustainable community development, and an enriched quality of life." We’ve been working on this for a long time, and because of the phrase "sustainable community development," we have joined with MACED and its Sustainable Communities Initiative to become a sustainable community. As part of that, last year we started working on indicators and we were very fortunate in that Maureen Hart, who’s quite an expert on indicators, came to one of our meetings and did a whole workshop on helping us develop indicators.
I brought a handout, which I’ll hand out after the panel has finished. One of the things we worked on was effective sustainable indicators. Effective indicators are relevant to sustainable development. They are understandable to the community at large, developed by local people, and understood by local people. They link the economy, society, and environment, and focus on the long-range view. They consider impact on other communities, and they are based on reliable and timely information.
The action team is very diverse. We try to include every segment of the community. Our meetings are always open and we feel that it is very important when you are working on indicators that you have the whole community involved. That it is not just a select group of people who decide on everything for the community. We listed the things we care about: education, housing, jobs, health, recreation, safety, culture, clean environment and water, conserving resources, trust, social relationships and neighborliness, honest elected officials, good government, and equal access to all the above.
Examples of poor indicators are net job growth, per capita state or local public expenditures for grades K-12, bags of highway litter collected per mile, number of permits for septic tanks, number of registered voters, percent of population who smoke, median value of houses in a community, amount of hazardous waste generated, number of people living within 50 miles of daily air passenger service. The reason these are bad indicators is that they are one-dimensional. When you count the success of your community by net job growth, are you really measuring whether the quality of life has improved in that community? Of course, you would count job growth, but you would also count things like: are they jobs that pay a living wage, is there health care attached to the jobs, is the industry that provides these jobs damaging the environment? So, you would go down a checklist to see if it assesses more than one thing.
Another example, per capita state or local public expenditures for grades K-12, measures whether you’ve spent more money on education in the past seven years since 1990, but if you only measure the money spent, have you actually measured an improvement in the quality of life or the quality of education? The number of registered voters is always really funny to me since in Kentucky we seem to have a way of keeping voters registered that are under a tombstone, but a better indicator would be the number of registered voters who actually vote in both local and national elections.
I also have a list of examples of better sustainable community indicators: employer payroll dedicated to training and education, adult literacy rate, and percent of residents actively involved in civic affairs. Betty’s example, what’s on the porch, would be a good indicator of pride in the community and without a good quality of life in the community, you are lacking in other areas of the community. Without the quality of life, you don’t have people showing the pride. Other examples of better sustainable community indicators include the percent of streets with adequate pedestrian and bicycle facilities, the percent of the population that exercise regularly, and progress toward the goal of 20 percent reduction in the use of potable water.
In the past, we have often used indicators of a problem rather than a solution or progress. The number of bags of litter picked up on the side of the highway is not an indicator of success in an antilitter program. It’s an indicator of a problem with litter. If you collected all the garbage in 1996 off the highway and you had 300 bags and in 1997 you did the same thing and you had 150 bags, then you would possibly have an indicator of success, so the indicator would be the percent reduction in the number of bags, not the actual number of bags.
I also have a checklist for sustainable community indicators. They are:
Is it relevant to sustainable development?
Is it understandable to the community at large?
Was it developed and accepted by local people?
Does it link at least two of the three "e’s" of ecology, economy, and equity?
Does it focus on the long-range view?
Does it consider impact on other communities?
Is it based on reliable and timely information?
Does it measure potential solutions or preventive steps, instead of problems?
Does it measure underlying problems that cause other problems?
Does it measure quality instead of quantity?
Does it emphasize development over growth?
And, does it measure diversity?
Finally, I want to hawk this book since I have some copies and you’re welcome to purchase them. The handout tells you Maureen Hart’s website, and there’s a lot of good stuff there if you are interested in developing indicators for your community.
Mr. True:
Good afternoon. I’m the Director of Research for the Cabinet for Economic Development and we are responsible for Kentucky’s strategic plan for economic development. It was a citizen-wide, statewide initiative several years ago. It resulted out of some legislation passed in 1992 by the General Assembly and from that we’ll get to today’s discussion on benchmarks because we have established some benchmarks for the strategic plan.
But I want to digress just a minute because we talked a little bit today about citizen activism and engaging the citizenry in discussion. Ten years of my life I spent in the tax business and some of my colleagues are here. You don’t know what citizen engagement is until you go into a county and you tell them you’re going to raise their assessment on their property by 20 percent across the board. You get citizen engagement so they’ll let you know where you stand.
Why have measures of progress? If you don’t have measures of progress, then your goals in your strategic plan or your objectives, the goals that you are trying to obtain, are just dreams. How are your dreams going to become reality if you don’t know whether you are making progress toward them and you don’t have some kind of measure for them? We measure progress to see if it works. It’s a pretty basic question. Is what we’re doing working?
An accountability measure is critical. Most of you represent a governmental or a nonprofit type of agency. In the private sector, we have an easy way of measuring progress and success—the bottom line. We don’t always have that in government and that’s why these benchmarks are so important, to have an accountability measure. Are we making a difference with what we’re doing when we go through visioning, strategic planning, setting goals, and all these things that we’ve been taught to do over the last 10 years, and that many of our organizations have done? That’s the bottom line. Will Rogers once said, "Even if you’re on the right track, if you sit there, you’re going to get run over." So we’ve got to know if we’re making progress or not.
How do we choose indicators? A lot of the presentations today have talked about engaging the citizenry in the process, but I’m going to discuss some of the characteristics of indicators that we looked for in establishing the benchmarks for our strategic plan. One of them is pretty basic. Most of this seems to be common sense. Do the benchmarks that you’ve established reflect your goals and your mission? For example, one of the goals in the strategic plan for economic development is to reduce unemployment and increase per capita income. Well, guess what two of our benchmarks are? We have six. One of them is a reflection of the unemployment levels and one of them is per capita income.
My favorite of the characteristics that we look for and try to focus on—and some of these things were stolen from the publications of the Long-Term Policy Research Center—is results versus efforts. What does that mean? For instance, the per capita income of the citizenry gives you an example of whether wealth is being created in the community. Of course, the Economic Development Cabinet and the strategic plan for economic development is concerned with economic development. How are our efforts affecting the per capita income in the state? Kentucky right now is at 81 percent of the national average and has been stuck there for several years. We were about 60 percent 30 or 40 years ago, so we’ve made progress, but we’ve flattened out over the last couple of years. Measuring that is the result of all the collective efforts that are being made in economic development in the state of Kentucky. So we looked for broad results-oriented measures when we chose the benchmarks that we ended up with.
In our benchmark process, we were real fortunate. Some of the community-level benchmarks that the other speakers have talked about, they’ve had to go out and create surveys or create ways of digging information up. We tried to concentrate on reliable, credible, third-party indicators, and by that I mean U.S. government statistics, things that were collected for other states and the nation so that we can compare ourselves to see what kind of progress we were making. That’s not always going to work with some of your organizations and some of the nonprofit groups according to what you’re trying to measure, but that’s what we try to focus on for a variety of reasons. We didn’t want to be criticized for picking benchmarks we could easily obtain or that were somewhat wishy-washy. We tried to look at indicators that were going to be there every year, that were collected by some other party other than ourselves.
What are you going to compare yourselves to? We tried to pick indicators where we could compare ourselves to our competitor states or the nation. For instance, we talk about our per capita income being $20,000 in the state of Kentucky. What does that mean? If it grew 10 percent from last year, is that good or bad? If it didn’t grow 10 percent from last year, but rather at about 5 percent, is that good or bad? I don’t know. Compared to what? What happened in the nation? If the nation grew at 10 percent and we grew at 5 percent, we didn’t make any progress; we lost. Flip that over, and if we grow at 10 percent and the nation grew at 5 percent, then we’ve made progress. That’s what we tried to do with our benchmarks.
There are multiple ways of looking at the same thing. Are we making progress in Kentucky’s economy? Before we pick a measure, is it something that we can measure? We called the report that the Economic Development Partnership adopted this fall Benchmarks to Measure Progress. We adopted per capita gross state product, per capita income, and average annual pay. There’s a difference between average annual pay and per capita income: per capita income measures all sources of income, earnings, dividends, as well as wages; average annual pay measures the type of jobs you are getting, and what the wages pay. We wanted to measure that, too. You can have an increase relative to per capita income of the nation that’s good, but are we catching that lower segment of society? What’s happening to our poverty level? So, we established some benchmarks on poverty levels as well. We also adopted unemployment and one other one, manufacturing share of employment, because generally manufacturing jobs pay higher than other types of jobs. That’s one of the focuses that we have in our economic development strategy.
We picked benchmarks for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015. The University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville by statute are to measure our progress each year, and give a report on how we are making progress, which is another concept of establishing benchmarks. I assume we’ll get that report in the Fall of next year. We established benchmarks at the state and subregions of the state that were manageable. We tried not to go down to the county level. We felt that was cumbersome. We picked some divisions of the state such as an east Kentucky corporation area, a west Kentucky corporation area, and that famous area of the state called the "rest of the state." I have a handout that gives an overview of the Benchmarks to Measure Progress report and it tells you how to get a copy of it. I will give them to the people who want to e-mail or call me and we’ll get you a copy. That’s all. Thank you.
Mr. Hall:
Thanks to the brevity and conciseness of our presenters, we have a significant amount of time for questions and answers, so I encourage you to engage in some discussion. And, as moderator, I’ll take the liberty of asking the first question. It was stated that an elementary tenet of measures of progress is that they be measurable and quantifiable. My question is can all goals and objectives be reduced to measurable and quantifiable measures or are there some goals or objectives that don’t lend necessarily to quantifiable, measurable goals? There are certain things that pertain to qualitative measures as opposed to quantitative measures and I was wondering if any member of our panel could respond to that?
Dr. King:
I will because you stomped one of my contrary buttons. As Mr. True said, working at the grassroots is very cumbersome. That’s what I joke about. It is cumbersome, and I think sometimes we forget who our audience is when we are setting benchmarks. Obviously, the Economic Development Cabinet’s is much easier to define because in some ways their audience is elected officials, whereas our audience in the vision process is the people in the community. You can have an indicator that says people are making more money today than they were a year ago, but what about the quality of life? Are they really enjoying life?
As Dan mentioned, there are some qualitative things that sometimes we don’t want to recognize, so I think sometimes our values are really the prisms that we set those benchmarks from because we look at things differently depending on our audience and where our context is. Sometimes it’s scary for me to even talk about indicators even though I know we need them; we need to be accountable. I think we just need to recognize that there is no such thing as value free, or maybe the most reliable indicators are the context that they are in.
Mr. True:
Dan, I can address that. If you have a goal and you can’t measure it, you need to look at your goal again.
Ms. Rogers:
Actually, quality of life goals can be measured. Whether we have more money now than we did 20 years ago, is our quality of life better or the same? I think that you can very easily say what percentage of your income are you spending on housing, or what percentage of your income are you spending to educate your child? There are all kinds of benchmarks that you can set for quality of life. It doesn’t have to be limited to how much or how many jobs.
Dr. King:
I think sometimes it’s when we don’t accept certain indicators. Maybe some groups, depending on your audience, might not accept that as a reliable indicator, and I think that’s sometimes more the question: what do we call reliable indicators. That was the question I was raising.
Dr. Forsythe:
I think you can also have goals that you’re measuring and your measurements may not really reflect whether you’re gaining or losing. For example, I was working with an environmental education program where we were trying to, through 16 Centers for Environmental Education at 16 different universities, increase the environmental awareness of students in secondary and elementary schools. Our measures were the number of teacher workshops we were conducting on environmental education. We were producing curriculum, so we were measuring a number of these workbooks that were being placed in the schools and then we were also buying other curriculums, Project Wild and Project Learning Tree, placing them in the schools and measuring all these things. We went before the TVA guru in TQM and he said, "All these measures aren’t worth a darn. How do you know that you’re increasing the environmental awareness of the students in the school? What measures are you doing to see that environmental awareness is increasing?" We had this nice little measuring system of increases in everything and we walked away from the whole program because we couldn’t show that the money we were putting into it was actually increasing the environmental awareness of students. We were measuring but we were measuring things that we couldn’t tie to progress.
Ms. Rogers:
Actually, you can measure those things and tie them to progress. One way to measure instead of measuring the number of books you distribute to students, you could measure the number of students who participated in recycling programs before and after you distributed the books and had the programs. So, even those things can be measured. Sometimes it just takes a little thinking and delving.
Dr. Forsythe:
I’m not saying they can’t be measured, I’m just saying sometimes we don’t measure.
Ms. Rogers:
I agree.
Dr. Forsythe:
We started off measuring and we could be measuring some things that would be more true indicators of our goal, like you just said.
Ms. Roberts:
OK. I agree.
Audience Member:
To take the role of skeptic for a minute, I worked with indicators a lot and I think that it is possible to find ways of measuring things although sometimes what you need to measure is difficult to measure. I am basically a mathematician turned social scientist turned bureaucrat. In 1974, I joined an evaluation branch of the Cabinet for Human Resources. We had five people. We were in charge of implementing program status reports. That lasted for about seven years. In 1974 we had indicators of success for every program in the Cabinet for Human Resources. We turned in progress reports to the legislature every six months, on how we were doing on those indicators. That lasted until the law changed, but I was successful for a while in convincing people to improve their indicators, and I cajoled the people and threatened them with LRC.
LRC did nothing. Time passed. LRC did nothing. Another year passed; LRC did nothing. People quit paying attention. LRC changed the law, and stopped requiring program status reports. People stopped keeping their indicators and they have gone by the wayside. Now, we are going back to indicators. My skepticism comes because indicators are great if decisionmakers make decisions based on those indicators, and, over time you’ve got to keep collecting them, chart your progress, measure your success, and make decisions based on them. That was a comment more than a question. I think we have a question back here.
Audience Member:
Thank you. I’ve often heard the statement that you get what you measure, and in negative terms, people look at measurements of how kids are doing in schools and they discover that the teachers are teaching the kids how to take the tests. I just wonder, first of all, if you agree it is true that you get what you measure and then, secondly, is it good or bad in a community context?
Dr. King:
I think it’s good. You are what you measure. I think the trick comes in involving the whole community so that you decide what is important for your community to measure. An indicator is worthless if you don’t have buy-in from the community or from the group that you are developing the indicators with.
Ms. Rogers:
To me, it seems like indicators are part of the vision. It’s like you were saying. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you’re going to be getting close. On the flip side of that, sometimes I think it’s good that we don’t really know what the indicators are because sometimes some of the best things surprise us. I think that’s part of the beauty of working in a community, that some of the best things are things that don’t fit those nice, neat little hierarchies or levels of indicators. I think there’s room for both. I think one of the nice things about having the conference here today is that we’re trying to hash out a broader definition of what indicators of success are, whether it is a community or working with the legislature. I think maybe you do need some, but at the same time maybe sometimes it’s not to have them too structured because our communities are not that structured. If everything were that black and white, we would be in a totally different context. That’s why we’re still having things like today.
Audience Member:
I think that also relates to the issue of making sure that we measure the right thing; we’re measuring the desired outcomes and not necessarily the input or the output or the amount of effort that you hope will produce the end result. Measuring the proper thing is important. If you measure the wrong thing, then the issue you raise becomes very troublesome. I think it also relates to what René said in terms of interrelationships between your objectives or your measures of progress. If you have an interrelationship, if something gets out of whack, or if you’re measuring the wrong thing, and if you have something that is singularly focused and not part of a broader picture, it may throw some other things out of whack. But if you have a strategic plan that’s valid, that has some interrelationship between the objectives, it serves as a check and balance in that process, but I understand your caveat.
Audience Member:
Just an observation based on what Penny was saying: maybe we need an indicator for unintended consequences, things that happen along the way that our indicators don’t pick up.
Audience Member:
That’s called taking advantage of opportunities.
Audience Member:
I’d like to ask a little bit about how the indicators you are asking us to comment on were arrived at. Or at least, I’d like to say something about some of them. One specifically that I’ve been living for the last 10 years, is number 17, and I think this is key because if we don’t get our language and our definitions straight, and if we don’t know what we’re talking about, we’re going to go in directions that we may not intend to go.
This morning, Ms. Miller said something about having 80 percent of the people getting garbage service. This is something I’m working with daily. The "number of dumps eliminated in 1995" is information from the EQC, which of course came from each county’s annual report, but there’s no definition of what a dump is yet at the state level. Some people consider it two bags of garbage on the road, and others of us consider it several truckloads. I clean up some dumps every year four or five times, but it’s counted four or five times if I report it separately. I’m telling the state that I’m doing this, but they don’t reflect that, they count it five times, as five dumps because I cleaned five dumps. But it’s really the same dump continuing.
This is the kind of detail that can really change the indicator or whatever we’re measuring and it changes what we really are saying about our state and our communities. It’s one example of several that I have tried to change because I make comments like this, at the state level, on my annual reports, and at meetings, and nothing ever seems to get done. I’m really curious about how we evaluate the information we get, and how we describe it. Does "households connected to a sewer system" mean a package treatment plant, a functioning sewer system, a bad one as well as a good one, or does it even mean a septic system? I don’t know; I don’t even know how anybody knows these things. And, that’s basically it. Next.
Mr. Hall:
Would anybody want to comment on this? I see Mike Childress in the audience.
Mr. Childress:
There are a lot of questions there. Where did these come from? The short answer is a lot of different places. Many of you may be familiar with Minnesota Milestones and Oregon Benchmarks. There are a handful of other states that have done similar projects like this and when we first got started, two or three years ago, we collected them all and it was remarkable the amount of convergence about what people want for the future of their states. The goals all look similar and the indicators look very similar as well. So we borrowed a lot of indicators that seem to match the goals, but we didn’t stop there. We sponsored a conference similar to this two years ago. We solicited input from people who came to that conference in Lexington. We had posters on the wall and were trying to identify indicators. We had some basic ones and asked for input and/or additional ones. We then put out that report and mailed it to 3,000 or 4,000 on our mailing list free and to anybody who wants it.
We tried to get the media involved so that we could get the word out to a broader base of folks and we were inviting input. No data were included, but we listed the goals and some indicators of progress that we think are good ones and asked for input. We also recognize this is a work in progress and that there are a lot of caveats to it. What we haven’t provided here is the detailed information and caveats. When we publish this, we’re going to have an extensive appendix where we can capture a lot of nuances to the data collection that you talked about because that may really be five dumps, or it may be one dump.
Finally, let me say this. I think that your point about the nuances, the subtleties, the problems with these data is well taken and that’s why on this assessment sheet, we’ve asked people to consider the goal. That’s the bottom line, really, these individual goals. We recognize that some of the indicators are good, some of them are lacking, and we ask folks to also include their own individual assessment, their perception of what’s going on in their own local community and their own personal experience with regard to these goals and whether they think we’re making progress toward them.
So, that’s where the data come from. We recognize that there are problems with it and it’s a work in progress. So let us know. If you have problems with this stuff, let us know, and if you like it, let us know. We like to hear good stuff, too. I’ll let Dr. Data, Ron Langley talk.
Dr. Ron Langley:
I just wanted to add one thing. We’re talking about benchmarks and things like this. It’s cheaper to use third party data and some people think it’s more unbiased to use third party data as opposed to collecting your own. We’ve heard comments to that effect, but the thing is, the point is well taken about where the data comes from. Is it really useful for measuring what you want it to measure? You can surf the web and find any numbers of data out there to measure virtually anything that you’d like, but what you need to consider is the people that collected that data, their purpose in collecting the data, and what they were collecting that data for. If it doesn’t have anything to do with the goal you are trying to measure with that data, then perhaps you need to do what the Center has done on some occasions and just go about getting their own. I know they worked very carefully to make sure they were measuring exactly what they thought they were trying to measure and get information that would be useful. So, I just think that over all caveat needs to be stated; for reasons of economy, you may be forced to use secondary sources of data to measure progress toward your goals. But you have to realize that sometimes you are going to run into these problems.
Audience Member:
This brings us back to your question full circle, but I want to put a plea in for another perspective on measurement and indicators and it links to the question, to who are we accountable? At one time someone told me that if you couldn’t count it, it didn’t exist. I know that there is a tendency to that perspective, especially at funding agency level and government level. But, at the community level or the human level, what’s important to us, we are storytelling people. And, I think another kind of measure that we need to think about collecting as we are doing community visioning, community planning, community action, is the stories of the people who are involved and how people are affected. I’m a demographer and I believe in the reality of numbers, but the truth of the matter is that when I work with communities they don’t want to know how many, what percentage of the population has this or that characteristic. They want to know about the people next door and about their lives. They want to know how what’s been done affects them or has improved the quality of their life. I’m not saying go one or the other, but I think that to ignore the importance of the story is to ignore a kind of indicator that has a very powerful effect on our understanding of what’s happening.
Audience Member:
I’d like to call attention to the fact that the subtitle of this conference is charting our path to prosperity. To me that means that a major consideration of this group ought to be economics. There are noneconomic factors to be sure, but economics is a discipline in which there are both incentives and disincentives. I was glad to hear some of the economic matters discussed by Mr. True, for example, the average family income or the per capita income. I assume he meant adjusted for inflation.
There was a study done at Western Kentucky University. Professor Liles was co-author of a paper which showed that among pairs of adjacent states, those with the lower taxes were the ones with the higher per capita incomes, so I would like to suggest something which may be quite unpopular in this group and that is that all of you work to lower the taxes in your community and statewide. There is not much you can do about the national tax situation on your own, but you certainly can do something about local taxes and you can prevail on your legislators to work on a lower tax base for the state of Kentucky. That means increasing efficiency, adhering to those activities which are specifically mandated by the Commonwealth’s constitution.
There are many other things such as garbage dumps, garbage collection, what have you, which have economic aspects that I think have not been advantageously explored by local governments and local citizen groups. Privatization comes to mind, for example, and the tendency as I judge from my own community, Lexington, is that bureaucrats do not like privatization, but the advantage of privatization is that private companies must meet competition which municipalities do not have to meet. So, I would like to respectfully offer the proposition that here are indicators, economic indicators, which can very clearly tell us whether or not we are making progress in our community and our Commonwealth if we will concentrate on those which are economic in nature.
Mr. Hall:
Again, I would like to thank our panelists for participating and thank you for attending.
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