The New York Times - September 18, 2008
Fernanda Santos

Correction: September 19, 2008

[An article on Thursday about the Mayor's Management Report, which assesses how New York City government responded in all areas during the past fiscal year compared with the previous year, misstated the number of free condoms the city distributed in fiscal year 2008. It was 39,070,000 - not 39,070.]

There were more condoms handed out (39,070,000), more complaints about rats, roaches and other critters (23,000) and more potholes repaired (210,032).

There were fewer homicides (516), fewer cars stolen (12,723) and fewer adults smoking (16.9 percent of the population).

The numbers - from the serious to the quirky and the surprising - were among the more than 1,219 performance indicators included on Wednesday in the Mayor's Management Report, which assesses how city government responded in all areas during the past fiscal year compared with the previous year.

It is an annual glimpse into what is and what is not working in this city of 8.2 million people and a sprawling bureaucracy of 300,000 public employees.

In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the report increased "the transparency of city government," which he described as "a critical part of our belief in accountability to the public."

It has been released every year since 1977, as required by the City Charter, but the mayor, who has an obsession of sorts with data and accountability, has compressed it significantly, turning an otherwise unwieldy document (it used to be as thick as an encyclopedia) into a manageable one (this year's has 220 pages).

It offers an uneven mix of good and bad news, with more good than bad. In the realm of public health, for example, there were 3,305 new AIDS cases diagnosed among adults in the 2008 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. That is 410 fewer than in the previous fiscal year and 2,020 fewer than in the 2004 fiscal year.

But new syphilis cases increased by 20 percent, which the report attributes largely to risky sexual behavior among men. This happened even though the city more than doubled the number of condoms it distributed during the same period.

The Buildings Department, which experienced a rash of fatal construction accidents in the past year that heightened concerns about the public's safety and the quality of its inspectors, registered 25 fatalities in the 2008 fiscal year and 167 injuries, which is more than it had in either the 2006 or 2007 fiscal years, the only other years for which statistics were available.

While there were about as many building inspections as there were in 2007, productivity fell to an average of 9.9 inspections per inspector per day, from 11.1 in 2007. That was because inspection requirements became more stringent and newly hired inspectors needed extra time to do the job, as the report indicates.

New Yorkers used more water in the 2008 fiscal year (about 139 gallons on average per person, per day) and called the city's 311 information system more than in any other fiscal year since 2004 (15 million times).

Children and adults visited public libraries more, and more of them joined recreation centers, largely because the city opened two new ones, on Staten Island and in Queens.

On the crime front, the news from the Police Department was generally favorable. Last year, it registered fewer homicide reports, 516, or 41 fewer than in the previous fiscal year, as well as a decline in the reports of every other major felony crime, like rape, robbery and car thefts.

At the same time, though, New York police officers were the subjects of 7,488 misconduct complaints - 2 percent fewer than in the previous year, but the second-highest number of complaints since 2004.

The verdict on city streets was also mixed. For the fourth year in a row, the annual rating of acceptable street cleanliness surpassed the 90 percent mark, traffic signals were fixed 70 percent faster than in the 2007 fiscal year and the city's network of bicycle lanes expanded by 70.6 miles.

The quality of street pavement declined, though, and there were more potholes to be repaired. (A mayoral spokesman said that the increase could be attributed in part to a program that sends inspectors to find defects on the streets and report them to the city for repairs.)

And it took the Transportation Department a bit longer, on average, to fix each pothole (2.7 days, as opposed to 2.1 days the previous year).

In the midst of it all, what might be Mr. Bloomberg's proudest accomplishment was the decline in the number of smokers since he signed a bill raising cigarette taxes by $1.50 in 2002 and, a year later, banned smoking in the workplace, including restaurants and bars.

In the 2007 calendar year, 16.9 percent of the city's adult population smoked, down from 21.5 percent in 2002. (Smoking, unlike most of the measures tracked in the report, is tracked by calendar year rather than fiscal year.)

The sharpest reduction happened on Staten Island, where the mayor was heckled once during a parade after the price of a pack of cigarettes reached the $7 mark. There, smokers made up 20.4 percent of the adult population in 2007, down from 27.2 percent in 2006.

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