The Urban Fiscal Crisis Becomes Routine

Abstract

For many American cities, fiscal crisis has now become fiscal routine.It is now five years since the advent of the acute stage of the New York City fiscal crisis, and in the intervening years numerous other cities have faced their own 11 financial emergencies. 11With this time perspective in mind, it is now appropriate to re-examine some propositions suggested earlier in this period, and to examine the conduct. of urban management in a time in which fiscal stringency has become more the norm than the exception.This paper will re-examine the performance of urban administration in portions of the New York City government, and will report on some of the variations in management which have occurred in the post-crisis period.It will also investigate the behavior of those w-ith supervisory responsibility over urban managers, to examine how the external constraints on urban management have evolved as fiscal stringency has become routinized.•(As just one indicator of this change from crisis to routine, the New York City Emergency Financial Control Board, the state monitoring agency with responsibility for overseeing New York City expenditure practices, has now dropped the word Emergency from its title.)• I -11-Use of Effectiveness Measures For each of the major agencies included in the 1978 Mayor's Management Report, the "Operating Statistics 11 portion of the report has been categorized for this.study as to whether the reported measures do, in fact, provide meaningful indicators of the service effectiveness of the agency.There can be no question that agencies saw themselves as under a mandate to produce some type of data, but the variation in data presented suggests considerable agency freedom in what types of infonnation they decided to include.Agencies are grouped together by the quality of the indicators they presented: 13 a .Agencies with good indicators of program effectiveness as of 1978

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