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| Courts and Legal Services |
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Butte County has become the first law enforcement agency in California to enable judges to digitally sign their names to search warrants. Traditionally, law enforcement officials must track down judges to have them physically sign after-hours warrants while in the midst of time-sensitive crime scene investigations. Officials in the field can now draw up a search warrant on a laptop and forward it to judges who are equipped with iPads, allowing the judges to review the grounds of the warrant and sign electronically even when they are not in chambers. Officials expect that arrest warrants and other orders will soon employ the technology.
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| Public Infrastructure |
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Commuters in an increasing number of states are benefiting from advances in infrastructure technology that allows bridges to be built and repaired in record times. In Boston, accelerated bridge construction techniques recently allowed the state to replace 14 bridges on Interstate 93 over 10 weekends, saving months, if not years. The techniques involve, among other things, the use of prefabricated sections that let workers close individual lanes instead of entire bridges. Mesquite, Nevada, and San Francisco, California, are also using these new techniques.
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| Organizational Management |
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In order to reduce the number of vehicular accidents its municipal workers are involved in, which added up to $1.2 million in damages for 2010 alone, the City of Toronto has unveiled a driver education program for its workers. The pilot training program, targeting 100 drivers who are on the road most, will only cost about $14,000 but has the potential to greatly diminish the number of collisions and associated costs. Evaluation will take place after a year and the test group will be compared to a control group of 100 drivers who did not participate in the program.
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| Service Delivery |
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Apps that enhance service delivery, and which are created or endorsed by local governments, continue to proliferate. In Boston, Street Bump can automatically detect potholes as one is driving, creating a GPS-aided map of the trip route. The data can then be sent to Boston work crews who can follow the route and instantly locate the road damage. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is promoting WeTap, an application that lets users map and find public drinking fountains, allowing them to forego the financial and environmental costs of bottled water.
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| Policing and Crime Prevention |
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In Barnes County, North Dakota, a “Volunteer Air Force” is assisting law enforcement with their patrols. Thirty pilots are volunteering their time and their planes to fly officers around the county as necessary. With only 10 to 15 minutes needed to get eyes in the sky, officers can quickly locate missing persons, suspects, or track high-speed chases when they are in the air. Pilots are even chipping in gas money for the effort.
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| 311's Coming Transformations |
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Much has been accomplished with the widespread deployment of these citizen-service systems. Today, the very existence of 311 is based on the idea that when citizens need help or have a question, government has the answers. The future will include the emergence of government as a provider of preemptive services — predicting where a person might fall or a sewer will back up and preventing it rather than merely responding after the fact.
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| Attracting Business Without Giving Away the Store |
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All states provide tax incentives for economic development, but most of them don’t do a good job of making sure that they’re getting value for the taxpayers' money. A new study from the Pew Center on the States aims to get states to inform their future tax-incentive decisions by carefully evaluating their current programs.
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| Rewarding Public Workers Who Produce |
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Despite a looming budget shortfall, Wisconsin's governor is fattening some state employees' paychecks. Although introducing pay-for-performance might reduce savings from austerity measures in the short term, it's just one of the ways in which government must realign incentives if it hopes to get back on the path to sustainability. Here's why that's a good thing to do.
Newsletter produced by: Jessica Engelman, editor; Brendan St. Amant, researcher and writer.
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About the Ash Center
The Roy and Lila Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation advances excellence in governance and strengthens democratic institutions worldwide. Through its research, education, international programs, and government innovations awards, the Center fosters creative and effective problem solving and serves as a catalyst for addressing many of the most pressing needs of the world's citizens. The Ford Foundation is a founding donor of the Center. Additional information about the Ash Center is available at http://ash.harvard.edu.
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