Zero progress on standardized infrastructure measures

It was a promise to empower residents and neighborhoods. During his campaign for mayor, Bob Buckhorn said he would establish "accountability standards” for each city department and its missions, from filling potholes to clearing drainage ditches.

The first step, he said in a written campaign platform, would be to complete a citywide assessment to identify and begin to address neighborhood needs.

Consequently, the plan said, not only would City Hall know its most pressing needs, but residents could hold the mayor and city employees accountable if they fell behind timetables that had been established to address those needs.

But as Buckhorn approached the halfway point of his four-year term, he acknowledged that there has been nothing accomplished on this promise: There is no initial assessment of city needs. No timetables have been established. There are no standards that residents can look to to hold city employees accountable.

In an interview with PolitiFact Florida on Feb. 26, 2013, Buckhorn said city departments already do something similar anyway, "but I don't know that we've compiled a massive list” of infrastructure needs.

"Each department knows what their outstanding obligations are,” he said.

Buckhorn went on to say that, contrary to his campaign promise, the idea was "not as much for the neighborhoods as it is for us internally and how we look at our budgeting and where we deploy our resources.” That way, he said, if the city has to cut funding, officials know the best places to cut. If the city gets additional revenues, it knows where to put the money to work.

Buckhorn said he still would like to follow through on this promise, but "I've got to figure out how to do it.”

Candidate Bob Buckhorn promised to create a comprehensive inventory of infrastructure needs that residents could use to hold city officials accountable. When asked about it recently, he said the idea was more to benefit city departments, which already know their responsibilities. That stands in direct contradiction to the original promise, which was about giving residents more information to hold city officials, including the mayor, accountable. And he acknowledged that nothing has been done on this promise in any case. To be useful, accountability standards would have to be created early enough in Buckhorn's term so that residents could track progress over time. That hasn't happened, and there is no identified plan to make it happen. We will revisit this issue if the city makes progress on it. As it stands, we rate this Promise Broken.