David N. Ammons

Email: ammons@sog.unc.edu 

David Ammons was a member of the faculty from 1996 until his retirement in 2021. During his career, he wrote, taught, and advised local governments and state agencies about performance measurement, benchmarking, and productivity improvement. As Professor Emeritus, he serves on the Credentialing Advisory Board of the International City/County Management Association and is currently under contract with Routledge publishers for his tenth book, Improving Local Government Performance Through Benchmarking (forthcoming). His previous books on local government management include Tools for Decision Making: A Practical Guide for Local Government, Third Edition, with Dale J. Roenigk (Routledge, 2022); Performance Measurement for Managing Local Government: Getting It Right (Melvin & Leigh, 2020); Municipal Benchmarks (M.E. Sharpe/Routledge, 2012); and Leading Performance Management in Local Government (ICMA, 2008). His articles have appeared in Public Administration Review; Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory; American Review of Public Administration; Public Performance & Management Review; State & Local Government Review; and other public affairs journals.

Ammons served on the National Performance Management Advisory Commission, the North Carolina Governor’s Advisory Committee on Performance Management, the National Council of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), the Executive Council of the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA), and the board of directors of ASPA's Center for Accountability and Performance. He was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2006. He is a recipient of the Joseph Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award presented by ASPA's Center for Performance and Accountability for work in the field of public sector performance (2020 and 2014); the Jack Vogt Award for outstanding commitment to the advancement of local government budgeting and evaluation, presented by the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association (2016); and the Paul Posner Pracademic Award to honor lifetime achievement and significant contributions to the field of budgeting and financial management as both a practitioner and an academic, presented by the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management (2019). Ammons earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma.