Pilot programs need permanence, not just an initial ‘bang,’ officials say
Dee Liu via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
Tech-driven partnerships can help ease various urban issues, speakers at ICMA’s annual conference said, but successful pilots that end without a long-term plan can create resident anger.
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA — City leaders in Ann Arbor, Michigan often heard complaints over a lack of restrooms in public spaces, so officials turned to technology to try and help.
The city partnered with Throne for a one-year pilot program with eight restroom units positioned in areas with heavy foot traffic like parks and downtown. Throne restrooms, which have popped up in several cities in recent times, have sensors to track any issues with cleanliness or anti-social behavior, and allow users to enter in various ways, including via QR code or cards distributed through community groups.
Derek Delacourt, Ann Arbor’s community services area administrator, said the pilot turned out to be a success, as the restrooms had over 100,000 uses that year, received high satisfaction marks in user surveys and saw very little vandalism or bad behavior.
But with a successful pilot comes the need to make programs permanent, which requires finding money in the city budget. Elected officials unanimously supported extending the partnership with Throne for five years. Delacourt said if pilot programs are popular, it can be painful to take them away from residents when that pilot expires, so cities must act accordingly.
“We talked a lot about: we can call it a pilot, but if it works, we're not going to be able to take it away,” Delacourt said during a panel discussion at the International City/County Management Association’s annual conference in Long Beach, California. “Before we call something a pilot, let's make sure that, if it's successful, that we have the willingness and ability and the whereabouts to fund it. That was a big conversation when we were done. It is a small cost to me now, based on the success of the service. When you see the initial cost, it can be difficult for folks to comprehend.”
Delacourt said it represents a “new approach” for a city to take, as opposed to previous iterations of public restrooms that were difficult to maintain, subject to antisocial behavior and were often not capable of being used year-round due to the change in outside temperatures and weather.
Other cities are looking to take new approaches in how they solve some of their most pressing issues, and getting their residents more involved. Ryan Kurtzman, Long Beach’s enterprise information services bureau manager, said the city built the Long Beach Collaboratory, known as the LB Co-Lab, to pair city staff with community members and businesses to identify a problem, find a solution, pilot it and then fully implement it.
The city recruited what it described as 12 “innovators-in-residence” from the community, who helped tackle issues like vacant lots, connect residents with city services and make traffic corridors safer. And rather than doing a traditional request for proposals that could be hundreds of pages long, the city issued a challenge-based request for proposals, which seeks to identify the problems to be solved and then be open to solutions.
LB Co-Lab then hosted a demo day at California State University’s campus in the city, where more than 200 people heard pitches and voted on a winner, with three projects out of the nine proposals selected for pilots.
Kurtzman said getting the community engaged on finding solutions for common challenges is key, and it helps build trust. He noted that a recent community survey found the percentage of Long Beach residents who say they trust the city to listen to their feedback has jumped from 47% to 95%, partly due to this program.
“Really this is just about bringing people together,” he said.
But Kurtzman agreed that governments have to be careful in how they deploy and evaluate pilots, not just by preparing for them to be successful and expected to become a permanent part of city life, but also if they fail.
“A lot of pilots start off with a bang; there's something that maybe an elected official or a city manager wanted to do, but there's not always a lot of follow-up and actually storytelling with the community,” he said. “In Long Beach with our pilot programs, we have a very structured evaluation where even if the pilot is not a good fit and we stop it at the end, we at least document what we learned, and that department can actually take that knowledge to another RFP, or another partnership, or another policy that they put together.”