Commentary
- How do we know our city is becoming cleaner over time?
By ODETTE T. RAMOS
Special to the Daily Record
Neighborhood groups, businesses, policy makers and others strive for a
Baltimore City with clean streets, alleys and neighborhoods.
The typical measures used
to understand the level of sanitation in Baltimore include tons of trash
collected after a city clean up, on-time trash collection, number of calls to
report problems and number of cleanups. While these measures are interesting,
they only tell us about the performance of strategies put in place to address
sanitation issues, and not about overall change in sanitation conditions over
time.
For example, the number of
tons of trash collected after a city clean-up tells us that a certain amount of
trash is off the street for the time being. On-time trash collection and quick
response times by city government tells us that the city is doing its job. The
number of calls about a problem and the number of neighborhood clean-ups each
year tells us that people are active in cleaning up their neighborhoods.
To do a better job of
measuring changing sanitation conditions and progress toward results, several
new indicators were created that are included in the most recent set of 40
Vital Signs — the outcome indicators that “take the pulse” of Baltimore
neighborhood conditions and track progress toward strong neighborhoods, good
quality of life and a thriving city. The new Vital Signs regarding sanitation
include the rate of reported incidents of dirty streets and alleys and the rate
of reported incidents of illegal dumping.
These new sanitation
indicators are calculated in the following way: A report of a sanitation
problem is entered into 311 from a resident call, inspector report or internal
staff. There could be many reports about that particular problem, but it is
counted as one incident. The total number of incidents, not the number of
calls, are then calculated into rates per 1,000 people in the area to
understand the degree of the problem. This is similar to how the crime rate is
calculated, and is a very innovative approach to measuring sanitation
conditions — no other city has attempted to develop such comprehensive
sanitation indicators.
Since this is a new way of
thinking about and measuring sanitation conditions, it is important to note
that, unlike most of the Vital Signs that have been tracked for the past four
years, these new Vital Signs have only been measured for the past two.
Therefore, any preliminary changes in the trends may be the result of the use
of the new system. We anticipate an increase in the rates at first, because
more residents and staff are reporting more incidents, and therefore more
incidents are entered into the system.
In the long term, we hope
to see a decrease in these Vital Signs regarding sanitation as the city becomes
cleaner and there is less need to report problems. For instance, the rate of
reported incidents of dirty streets and alleys has increased to 17.2 in 2003
from 6.7 in 2002. Most of the neighborhoods had the same degree of change or
higher. The areas with the highest rate of change were in the north central and
east Baltimore areas, where targeted city and neighborhood sanitation efforts
resulted in more incidents being recording in the system.
As the city becomes
cleaner, we expect these rates of reported sanitation incidents to fall. Then
we will know whether the efforts of residents, neighborhood groups, policy
makers, business districts and others are all making an impact on improving
sanitation conditions over time.
** You can see these and the newest trends on housing,
economic development, children’s well being, and others in the upcoming 3rd
reporting of the Vital Signs. Vital Signs III will be available from the
Alliance this month. Log onto www.bnia.org or
call 410-235-0944 for a copy.
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Odette T. Ramos is
executive director of the Baltimore
Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, which tracks various indicators to
measure progress in Baltimore City neighborhoods. Ramos writes a monthly column
for The Daily Record. The opinions expressed are her own.
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