On Saturday, the City of El Paso was named a top-performing city by Governing and Living Cities from the third annual Equipt to Innovate national survey.
“Our organization continues working to be a top performing city that leads the nation implementing best practices, while still looking to improve the work and services for our community,” said City Manager Tommy Gonzalez.
El Paso was named the Top Performing City in the Employee-Engaged category. El Paso was also named a high-performing city in the Broadly Partnered and the Smartly Resourced categories.
Through the survey, the Equipt framework benchmarks cities’ progress toward high performance across the seven vital competencies for governing in complex times.
A team of researchers evaluated responses from cities across the country and determined El Paso has been ranked among the top 10 in the overall survey for a third consecutive year.
Best practices noted for this designation include the City’s ability to activate cross functional teams including goal teams that lead progress made on the strategic plan in addition the ability to develop and deploy process improvement teams.
“Mayors and city managers know that innovation is the key to high performance, but they also know they cannot simply demand that staff innovate,” said Mark Funkhouser, publisher of Governing.
“The key is for cities to create conditions that spur innovation and that’s what our Equipt to Innovate survey measures. The results of this, the third annual Equipt to Innovate survey, show that cities are continuing to actively build their capacity to create vibrant communities of engaged residents.”
The Equipt initiative is a joint effort of Living Cities and Governing magazine and is anchored in seven key characteristics of high performance government — being dynamically planned, broadly partnered, resident-involved, race-informed, smartly resourced, employee-engaged and data-driven.
For a comprehensive overview of the survey findings download the report: “Profiles in High-Performance Government: Cities on the Move”.
