Part I: November 15 – 12:00 p .m to 1:00 p.m EST – Register
What are partnerships and how PBB leads to unveiling opportunities around partnerships
Part II: December 13 – 12:00 p.m to 1 :00 p.m. EST – Register
CPBB to co-present with leading public-private local government provider SafeBuilt
III. Date in January 2017 TBD
City of Englewood (CO) City Manager and CPBB provide a case study of Englewood merged their Fire Department with a neighboring jurisdiction.
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“While politicians easily offer policy prescriptions, they often fail to ask how they will be paid for.” – Mark Funkhouser, Publisher of Governing Magazine
Governing recently published Putting Citizens First with an Innovative Approach to P3’s. In the guide, the authors state,
“Governments continue to find new ways to leverage private sector money, expertise, innovation and flexibility. This is especially true for states and localities, which in the past 20 years have rapidly expanded the scope, scale and stakes of that leverage. This practice of deeper private sector involvement in public services is broadly known as public-private partnerships, or P3s.”
To Share, or Not to Share
Where do you look to find these partnership opportunities? What type of criteria would help you figure out where a partnership could exist?
SAFEbuilt is a company that is revolutionizing building department’s through shared services. For some services, there are proven successes that can provide a ready made blue-print for how to implement them in your community.
In the City of Cincinnati, Ohio, City Council identified opportunities for partnership using PBB as a policy priority. In Douglas County, Nevada, the Board of County Commissioners did the same. In the City of Fort Collins, CO, the city’s funding to support the Rocky Mountain Innosphere (RMI) was high priority.
Priority Based Budgeting and Shared Services
Priority Based Budgeting provides a comprehensive review of the entire organization, identifying every program offered, identifying the costs of every program offered, evaluating the relevance of every program offered on the basis of the community’s priorities, and ultimately guiding elected and appointed officials to the policy questions such as:
- What is the local government uniquely qualified to provide, offering the maximum benefit to citizens for the tax dollars they pay?
- What programs are most appropriate to fund by establishing or increasing user-fees?
- What programs are most appropriate for establishing partnerships with other community service providers?
- What services might the local government consider “getting out of the business” of providing?
- Where are there apparent overlaps and redundancies in a community because several entities are providing similar services?
- Where is the local government potentially competing against private businesses within its own community?
Untapped Potential
According to the State Department, approximately 1.5 million non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) operate in the United States. There are 87,453 units of local government as recognized by the US Census. Local government no longer needs to be everything to everybody. \
Bill Clinton give a speech recently where he said the single thing he’d love to “do-over” from his Presidency would be to understand all of the NGO’s and non-profits out there, what they’re doing, and how government could partner better. It’s more efficient, there’s less duplication, and we must find the best providers of services who have the greatest chance of achieving great outcomes.
Public Private Partnerships (or P3’s) are an opportunity for the future of local government and our communities. Local governments are able to tap into additional resources and bring other service providers into the same mission.
Government doesn’t have to be in the same businesses it has been in throughout history, providing these same services are other service providers who are working on the same societal objectives of safer communities, healthier people, a more thriving economy, etc. Government must identify the players and leverage the force of their efforts – thereby reducing redundancies within community, maximizing key partnerships with these services providers, and ultimately optimizing the resources that a community has from all of it’s service providers.
The trick to the P3 solution, is three-fold:
- What: what services make for ideal P3’s in your community? Not every community is the same, and therefore we need a methodology to discover what services are ripe with opportunity for partnership.
- Who: who are the other potential partners in your community, with whom you can share services, regionalize shared services and potentially consolidate services with?
- How: finally, how do we begin to envision a path to execution and implementation of a P3 opportunity?
Supplemental Reading