Today, I had my first conversation with a city official about a good governance proposal I’m exploring. He gave me a fairly candid half hour of his time.

My update from the discussion is that my city is doing better than I’d anticipated on producing analysis of its own spending and operations quality. The city‘s auditor produces a public dashboard of outstanding issues, with updates and paragraph-length explanation of each, broken down by department, audit and status.

Instead, it seems like there is a real inability to accept any analysis as factual. Reports are decoration for an argument. At best, a supposedly neutral body may constrain the space of wild exaggerations that city officials can get away with. Capacity that is neutral tends to be underutilized, and if it’s not protected, undermined the moment it goes against somebody’s interest.

Whats missing seems to be some mixture of sustained attention over the long term at putting the surfaces information into action. Scandals get news coverage when they are first surfaced, then forgotten about by the media. Updates and progress don’t make the news. As a result, the incentive is to hunker down and get through a bad news cycle. You get neither rewards nor further punishment after the first news breaks.