Measure what matters and improve what we measure: The City already makes some data available (for example, here, for annexations); such an approach must be generalized to bring transparency to the work of the Commission.
At my company, we have a saying: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” It’s something I practice every day, and I believe City Hall should too. Making Johnson City better requires more than goals and good intentions. We need qualitative and quantitative measures that tell us where we’ve been, where we are today, and whether our decisions are actually working. And those measures need to be precise enough to help us decide what to do next.
What I’ll push for:
- Create a public City performance scorecard with a focused set of measures residents can easily understand, covering priorities such as affordability, housing, public safety, infrastructure, transportation, development, parks, finances, and service delivery.
- Establish clear measures before launching major initiatives, so we know what success looks like and can determine whether an investment or policy is delivering the results we expected.
- Track trends, not snapshots, using historical and current data to identify what is improving, what is getting worse, and where the City needs to intervene.
- Combine numbers with residents’ experiences, using surveys, town halls, neighborhood feedback, service requests, and other qualitative information to understand what the statistics alone cannot tell us.
- Make reporting actionable for the Commission, with regular performance reviews that identify problems, explain likely causes, and recommend specific actions rather than simply presenting data.
- Report results publicly and consistently, including progress toward Horizon 2045 priorities, major capital projects, and other Commission commitments.
- Change course when the evidence tells us to. Measurement only matters if we’re willing to learn from the results, acknowledge when something isn’t working, and make a better decision.
Residents should be able to answer three simple questions about their city: What did we say we would do? Are we doing it? Is it making things better?
