For the second year in a row, Tacoma was named one of the worst run cities in the country. The report by WalletHub compares budgets and quality of services offered by 149 US cities. Ranking just behind Detroit and only slightly better than Flint, Michigan, Tacoma ranked 141 on the list.
From WalletHub “The past year has been a true test of the effectiveness of local leadership. City leaders have had to deal with economic difficulties like high inflation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other issues like elevated homicide rates.
Even during less difficult times, running a city is a tall order. The larger the city, the more complex it becomes to manage. In addition to representing the residents, local leaders must balance the public’s diverse interests with the city’s limited resources. That often means not everyone’s needs can or will be met. Leaders must carefully consider which services are most essential, which agencies’ budgets to cut or boost, and whether and how much to raise taxes, among other decisions.
But how do we measure the effectiveness of local leadership? One way is by determining a city’s operating efficiency. In other words, we can learn how well city officials manage and spend public funds by comparing the quality of services residents receive against the city’s total budget.
Using that approach, WalletHub compared the operating efficiency of 149 of the largest U.S. cities to reveal which among them are managed best. We constructed a ‘Quality of Services’ score made up of 36 metrics grouped into six service categories, which we then measured against the city’s per-capita budget.
In order to determine the best- and worst-run cities in America, WalletHub compared 149 of the most populated cities across six key categories: 1) Financial Stability, 2) Education, 3) Health, 4) Safety, 5) Economy and 6) Infrastructure & Pollution.
We evaluated those dimensions using 36 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest quality of service.
Next, we calculated an overall ‘Quality of City Services’ score for each city based on its weighted average across all the metrics. Finally, for each city, we divided the ‘Quality of City Services’ score by the ‘Total Budget per Capita’ (dollar amount) in order to construct a ‘Score per Dollar Spent’ index — displayed as ‘Overall Rank’ in the Main Findings table above — which we then used to rank-order the cities in our sample.”
Link to WalletHub report.
The Tacoma Sun 