Mayor Cara Spencer calling a former ambassador by the wrong name earlier this year led to a visit to St. Louis today by former mayor, governor, and presidential candidate Martin O’Malley.
As a two-term Baltimore mayor, elected in 1999, O’Malley implemented CitiStat, a performance management and accountability program that tracks metrics like the rate at which potholes are filled, streets are cleaned and abandoned cars are towed. Two decades later, Spencer launched CityStat (note the y), which tracks and makes public similar metrics in St. Louis. O’Malley was in town to meet with Spencer and her staff and advise on how to better make use of the data.
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“We’ve never had better tools and an easier way to collect data and to analyze it for its insights,” said O’Malley. “But we oftentimes bump up against 250 years of political wisdom that says, ‘Oh my god, you don’t want to share that because your opponents or the press might cherry pick the bad things.’”
He and Spencer held a media scrum Wednesday morning in Spencer’s office, which O’Malley said is bigger than the one he had as mayor. O’Malley said that local governments have proven more willing than their state and federal counterparts to embrace tools that make municipal performance data public. “Mayors have had an easier time embracing this brave new world,” he said. “If your people go out to the dirty alley or the house that’s causing problems in the neighborhood—everybody knows no amount of your speechifying is going to convince somebody their alley is cleaner than it is.” You might as well make the performance stats public and use them to try to improve.
Spencer launched CityStat in April. The portal allows St. Louis residents to quickly look up data on how long it takes the city to fill potholes, trim dangerous trees, and more.
The impetus to have O’Malley come in was for City Hall staffers to pick his brain about how he used the similar program first in Baltimore as mayor then as governor of Maryland.
The city’s chief operating officer Ben Jonsson, who has used the same data that feeds into CityStat to reconfigure trash pickup routes and the city’s recycling program, said that one of his main takeaways from meeting with O’Malley was that city services really can kick into gear when data collection people are able to work hand in hand with people in the neighborhoods, in the case of St. Louis, the Neighborhood Stabilization Officers. “That’s where we’re heading,” he said.
O’Malley’s visit to St. Louis, which the city did not fund, has its roots in his 2019 book Smarter Government, which extols a data-driven approach to governance.
Spencer read the book when she was an alderwoman and it stuck with her. So much so that earlier this year, when she had a phone call with Kevin O’Malley, the former ambassador to Ireland and current professor of practice at Saint Louis University Law School, Spencer accidentally called him Martin. She then apologized, saying that the former governor’s book had been a big influence on her.
It turned out that the two O’Malleys knew each other. One O’Malley was able to arrange a visit from the other.
“Yes, we are related. No, we don’t know how,” quipped the Baltimore pol. The former ambassador gave the former governor a tour of Forest Park Tuesday night. They watched the crew set up for South Pacific at The Muny. The visiting O’Malley—who famously inspired the character of ambitious Councilman-turned-Mayor Tommy Carcetti on The Wire—says he loved the vibe.
Depending on who you ask, Spencer may have also made some news of a different variety yesterday.
She was commenting on the fact that people don’t necessarily need a portal to tell them if their trash is getting picked up or not. “They can feel that that’s the report card that residents are going to rely on, whether or not they’re going to reelect me,” she said.
“Did you just announce something?” asked KSDK’s political editor Mark Maxwell.
“That I’m running again in three years?” she said. “I mean, look, I have every intention to continue serving.”
She then moved the topic of conversation to recycling logistics.
