O'Malley chief more than just the ‘stat guy'
Gallagher decision to return home leads to the top
ANNAPOLIS — When mayors in Philadelphia, Buffalo, N.Y., and Somerville, Mass., looked to create government performance models driven by statistics, all roads led to the office of Matthew D. Gallagher.
In some bureaucratic circles, the tall, no-nonsense Baltimore native is regarded as the architect of a public sector management tool that has taken hold nationwide and is catching on abroad.
But as he endures his first legislative session as O'Malley's chief of staff, Gallagher is no longer just the "stat guy." His portfolio cuts across the entire spectrum of policy and politics.
"You've got to try to see the whole field," he said in a recent interview.
Gallagher was 24 years old and a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia when he got an internship in the office of then-Mayor Edward G. Rendell.
At the time, Philadelphia had a program dubbed CrimeStat that examined ways to make its police department more efficient. It was fashioned after a similar program in New York that helped to dramatically curtail crime.
"This was the halcyon days, when everyone was interested in reinventing government," said Gregory S. Rost, who served as chief of staff to Rendell and worked closely with Gallagher.
After earning his master's degree in government administration, Gallagher took a job in Rendell's Office of Management and Productivity. There, he focused on ways to modernize the city's procurement process and performed economic analyses.
As director of the city's productivity bank, which provided loans to departments that needed up-front capital for long-term investments, Gallagher was in charge of bringing modern business practices to government.
"He's one of the young turks that helped us turn Philadelphia around," Rost said.
It would lead Gallagher to return home to Baltimore.
O'Malley (D) was elected mayor in November 1999, just as Rendell's second and final term was ending. Gallagher recalled members of Baltimore's business community visiting Philadelphia to gauge how Rendell involved businesses in his mayoral transition eight years earlier.
Gallagher accepted an offer to lead the Greater Baltimore Committee's and Presidents' Roundtable's Management and Efficiency Review, which developed roughly 250 recommendations to improve city government.
O'Malley's top aide at the time, Michael R. Enright, asked Gallagher to transition from making suggestions to implementing them.
The decision was not difficult.
"Getting a chance to work in city government in Baltimore was like playing third base for the Orioles," he said. "I couldn't have imagined anything better than that."
Revolutionizing stats
New York City Transit police officer Jack Maple developed the first data-driven performance application in government.
The concept was simple: Track crime using pins stuck in maps. Maple's model, called "Charts of the Future," is credited with reducing subway crime by 27 percent. It evolved under city police commissioner William J. Bratton under the name CompStat. Between 1995 and 2003, the number of murders in New York was cut in half.
But Baltimore was the first to adopt a citywide management tool.
"When you're trying to manage a very complex organization with billions of dollars in budgetary resources and tens of thousands of people, you don't want to make decisions based on instinct or whim," Gallagher said. "You want to make sure that you're applying resources effectively, efficiently, and the best way to do that is to have good, current accurate information on which to base those decisions."
The results spoke for themselves. The city saved $13.2 million in the first year of CitiStat, nearly half of it through reduced overtime pay.
It might never have happened without Gallagher, said Enright, who left the O'Malley administration this week to take a private sector job.
"CitiStat was a good idea, but good ideas are a dime a dozen," he said. "It became a great management tool because of people like Matt Gallagher putting in the hard work every day to kick it to life. If they hadn't done that, it would have been just another good idea that would have ended up on the cutting-room floor."
In an interview, O'Malley said Gallagher was seen as a star the moment he came back to Baltimore.
"Early on, Jack Maple said to Michael Enright, ‘Keep a leash on Gallagher, he's a killer,'" O'Malley said recently. "But, Matt has continued to become more and more knowledgeable, while becoming more and more innovative."
Now, Baltimore is the prototype for local and state governments that develop performance measures, said Robert D. Behn, a lecturer in public management at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Behn is writing a book called "The PerformanceStat Potential" that focuses heavily on CitiStat in Baltimore.
Shortly after O'Malley was elected governor, StateStat was born. Gallagher was tapped to put it in place. BayStat followed.
Applying CitiStat to state government was a natural evolution, Gallagher said. Still, converting it to work on the larger scale took diligence and dedication.
"Putting the letters ‘S-T-A-T' behind something doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work better," he said. "It's very important that you really drive this [home] day in and day out, week in and week out. It's a little bit like baseball. It's a long season. You really have got to stay focused. You have got to look at things over the long haul."
CitiStat and StateStat have earned many accolades over the years, but Enright said there is no secret formula behind its success. People invested in asking questions, digging up data and using them to reach outcomes.
"The numbers are just numbers unless you tie them to politics and policy improvements," Enright said.
One area Gallagher, who lives in Baltimore, takes particular pride in is the elimination of the DNA backlog at the Maryland State Police forensics lab.
At its core, StateStat is aimed at evaluating agency procedures, defining its core mission and streamlining its operations. The state agriculture department applies it to strict monitoring of the cover crop program. The state's GreenPrint initiative rates the ecological value of every parcel of land in the state to make better policy choices on sustainability and land acquisition. A similar objective, called AgPrint, which is currently in development, would rank the state's agricultural assets to serve farmers. BayStat is being used to track pollution levels in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.
Movin' on up
In September, O'Malley appointed Gallagher to chief of staff, replacing Enright, who became a special adviser focusing on energy projects and stimulus tracking.
Although the move meant more responsibilities and a broader portfolio, Gallagher jokes that the biggest impact is fielding more phone calls and having "one less word on my business card."
But he acknowledges the challenge in pushing through O'Malley's legislative priorities at a time when so much attention is focused on the state's fiscal troubles.
"I'm all out of coming up with new adjectives to describe how difficult things are right now," he said.
Despite his extensive government background, do not expect Gallagher's name to ever show up on the ballot. He is happy behind the scenes.
"I guess I'm just wired a little bit differently," he said.
Although the chief of staff's role is far more expansive, Gallagher still possesses a laser focus, according to his boss.
"Matt's been a huge part of whatever success we've had as a city administration, or statewide as the O'Malley-Brown administration," O'Malley said. "Matt has been a central part of all those accomplishments, from Citystat, to Statestat, to Greenprint, anything related to performance measurements and making our government work. I've rarely met a person who believes more passionately about making government and a person who believes more deeply that you can make government work than Matt does."
Staff Writer Douglas Tallman contributed to this report.
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