Municipal Benchmarks: Assessing Local Performance and Establishing Community Standards, Third Edition

View inside the book or buy the book from the publisher, Routledge.

Completely updated with new listings and statistics throughout, this comprehensive resource gives urban experts, municipal leaders, management analysts, and pre-professionals essential practical tools to establish and assess a municipality's performance in all areas of operation. It goes beyond the current literature on local government performance measurement and offers benchmarks on more than 40 key topics against which performance can be assessed.

The book includes relevant national standards developed by professional associations and actual performance targets, as well as performance results from a large selection of respected city governments. This edition provides new or expanded listings of professional standards across the full array of municipal functions. Two all-new chapters cover economic development and benchmarks for municipal airports, call centers, mail centers, print shops, and public information offices. Performance statistics for more than 250 city governments help public management professionals keep abreast of the most current information available. Originally published by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., the book is now available from Routledge.

"David Ammons has assembled a remarkable volume of benchmark data for a comprehensive range of municipal government services. Municipal Benchmarks will be of considerable help for municipalities in laying the groundwork for an accountable government."

Harry Hatry
Director, Public Management Program
The Urban Institute

"As a long time practitioner of progressive management in local government, I am delighted to see that ideas for advancing our industry are alive and thriving. David Ammons' collection of municipal benchmarks does an incredible service to every municipal manager in the country, and perhaps the world. These benchmarks clearly set standardized ways of looking at measuring the performance of municipal service delivery."

Ted Gaebler
City Manager, Rancho Cordoba, California
(co-author of Reinventing Government)