The City of San Diego needs a strategic redesign to emphasize efficiency and accountability. The centerpiece of the reorganization is the conversion of the office of mayor into a role more like a chief executive officer -- one that would bring unprecedented accountability to the City. The city manager would become the "chief administrative officer" reporting directly to the mayor (and not to the city council).

The Performance Institute's recommended reorganization focuses on three activities:

Centering City Government Around Citizen Needs
The City should be reorganized to make serving each citizen its top priority. The bureaucratic maze makes access to services needlessly difficult and oversight of budgets and operations nearly impossible.

• Public Affairs - The City should concentrate and consolidate the public affairs and punlic information staffs of each of its departments and agencies. Doing so would not only produce signficiant cost savings (both in overhead and in activity expenditures), but would result in a more coordinated public communication process for the city.
• 311 Centralized Citizen Call Center - The City should consolidate 20-plus call centers into one city-wide center, providing one-stop service to citizens. By utilizing relationship-management software and maintaining updateable records in a centralized database, citizens will receive considerably better service.

Consolidating and Eliminating Duplication
Efforts to consolidate the City's sprawling bureaucracy can both save money by concentrating "fixed-cost" resources and improve service delivery by heightening coordination. The Performance Institute has recommended the elimination of 10 departments and bureaus to improve service delivery and save $4.5 million in FY05, and $8.5 million in FY06. Below are three examples of recommended consolidations, which are outlined in more detail in the Options Reports presented to the City Council and to the public.

• Neighborhood Code Compliance Department and the Department of Transportation's Parking Management Division into the Neighborhood Code Enforcement Department for between $450,000 and $825,000 in cost savings.
• Department of Transportation and the Engineering and Capital Projects Department into the Department of Public Infrastructure for between $1.8 million and $5.7 million in cost savings.
• Components of the General Services Department, the Real Estate Assets Department, Petco Park, and Qualcomm Stadium, into the Department of Property and Asset Management for between $1.7 million and $4.6 million in cost savings.

Creating an Office of Management and Budget
The newly created Office of Management and Budget would have functional responsibility for assembling the city's budget on the mayor's behalf, working year-round with city departments on long-term strategic planning, performance-based budgets, and day-to-day administrative management.

OMB will also bring together the City government's shared administrative services, including technology management, financial management, personnel, and procurement. Such a concentration will save the City a considerable amount in overhead costs and add a streamlined efficiency in the delivery of administrative services.