November 2011
Dear Honorable Members of the West Boylston Board of Selectmen:
This is the sixth annual report called Managing For Results prepared as a way of measuring and managing our departmental performance. I hope to be able to use this document to develop and improve goals, objectives, and performance indicators for future budgets. There is a school of managerial thought that performance continues to improve through better linkage of mission, goals, objectives, and performance indicators and I clearly subscribe to that philosophy.
The Town continues to be both ‘students’ of performance measurement but also ‘teachers’ of performance measurement. We are ‘students’ to the extent that we continue to learn more about performance measurement and refine the approach used in West Boylston. We continue to review the measures and add those we feel are appropriate. I continue to attend training seminars and read reports to better improve our performance measurement report.
We have been ‘teachers’ of performance measurement through our good example we set for other communities. As you know this program has received numerous awards and recognitions. In 2008 we were the proud recipient of a Certificate of Achievement from the International City/County Management Association for excellence in the field of Performance Measurement. The Certificate of Achievement recognizes local governments that have collected and reported performance information for at least two years in four or more service areas and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to rigorous verification and public reporting of their performance information. Over the past three years, our program was recognized by the National Center for Civic Innovation as part of the ‘Trailblazer’
program. The aim of this initiative was to encourage local and state governments to apply the criteria specified in the Governmental Accounting Standards Board's (GASB) Special Report, Performance Reporting: Suggested Criteria for Effective Communication. This award came with a $5000 stipend to support the program as well. The grant award paid to have an Executive Report sent to all residents, added a survey tool for our website for customer satisfaction surveys and to improve our performance measurement program.
We continue to hope that the trend for performance measurement expands so that West Boylston will have appropriate benchmark communities in which to measure against in the future. I would like to thank the West Boylston Department Managers for their participation in this program this year. They were certainly receptive to undertaking this exercise and deserve the Town’s appreciation for their progressive approach to this project.
Sincerely,
LEON A. GAUMOND JR.
Town Administrator
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