Welcome from the County Executive

Ron Sims
King County Executive

Welcome to the 2008 King County AIMs High website! This site is designed to help you understand social, economic, and environmental conditions throughout the county and what King County government is doing to improve those conditions. Measuring performance is a hallmark of good governance in the 21st century and one that I am proud to champion. I hope you find the performance results on this website interesting and useful.

Public Reporting
Our focus on publicly reporting community conditions and county government performance reflects my expectations that our work is relevant, important, and understandable to the residents of the county. Last year's performance report received for the second time the prestigious "Certificate of Excellence in Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting" from the Association of Government Accountants. I am very proud to be among the leading jurisdictions in the country to receive this distinction.

In further support of public access to performance information, this year you are seeing our first King County performance dashboard, designed to make performance information even more accessible to a broader public audience. The dashboard shows some of our key performance results expected by the public. The content and the layout of the dashboard were developed in consultation with a panel of residents who told us what they thought was meaningful, as well as easy to read.

KingStat
Beyond publicly reporting our performance results, I have been using this same information in regular meetings with my top management to discuss performance and policy issues through the KingStat process. KingStat is my system to review progress towards county goals, put attention on areas needing improvement, and to serve as a forum where performance information is used to inform policy, budget, and operational decisions.

Budget Alignment
Last year in my budget speech, I stated that I wanted to align departmental business plans with the budget process. In 2008, we started to make major strides in developing performance measures for every government program, not just those with high public interest or visibility. I want to ensure that performance measures are being used in the budget process to help us make decisions and evaluate potential trade-offs, especially given the difficult economic and budget times that we are facing. Given the potential duration of the county's budget challenges, believe it is critical that we are able to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of our programs. We are committed to managing our resources properly so that we can deliver critical regional and local services.

In the Near Future
This year the County Council passed the Performance and Accountability Ordinance (Ordinance 16202) and a transparency motion (Motion 12791). In addition to codifying many of our existing reports and practices described above, the new ordinance and motion call for some additional improvements. We will be starting on a countywide strategic planning process, agencies will be developing 5-year strategic plans, and you will start seeing additional user-friendly reports to help you assess our work. For example, in addition to the performance dashboard, we will be producing a Popular Annual Financial Report, a short summary of accounting data in an easy to understand format. This work is collectively designed to help us be strategic, be a high performance government, and provide services and information of value to all residents.

I am proud of all that we have accomplished to date, as we continue to advance the transparency and accountability of King County government.