City: Lafayette, Louisiana

Reporting to:Mayor-President’s Policy Advisor

The Challenge

City leaders in Lafayette are working to improve their processes for creating, prioritizing, and delivering capital improvement projects. The city’s current five-year capital budget, which covers construction on buildings, roads, sidewalks, parks, and other infrastructure, totals nearly $1 billion. These projects are growing more complex as the city increasingly promotes both the development of outlying areas as well as the revitalization of existing neighborhoods. Meanwhile, city leaders are eager to tackle longstanding quality-of-life challenges, from improving walkability and reducing congestion to mitigating flooding.

Lafayette Mayor-President Monique Boulet, who has held office since 2024, comes from a background in regional planning. One of her top priorities is developing Lafayette’s infrastructure in a way that boosts economic development and improves quality of life. For the past two years, Boulet’s administration has worked to understand and improve the city’s current delivery process for capital projects. That work is accelerating through Mayor-President Boulet’s participation in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. As part of the Initiative’s programming, city leaders are working with coaches to research the lack of coordination among agencies in the data they use to create and prioritize projects, and to find ways to standardize project delivery to enable more consistent evaluation of results. In a related move, the administration is reorganizing multiple departments that play a role in capital project delivery, including agencies for traffic, roads and bridges, drainage, and capital improvements. The reorganization is intended to strengthen planning while simplifying staffing for project delivery.

Amid these changes, Lafayette leaders aim to create a more data-informed process for developing capital projects to reduce bias and enable a more objective evaluation of results. They also plan to develop performance metrics that connect capital spending to outcomes in order to boost the long-term impact of investments, create accountability, and enable city leaders to better communicate with residents about how their tax dollars are spent.

Key questions include:

• What data are currently being used—and should be used—in addressing capital needs in the community?
• What standard operating procedures exist to keep this data updated, educate staff on its usefulness, and utilize it to prioritize and evaluate projects?
• What performance indicators should exist in departments responsible for infrastructure and capital project delivery?
• Who will measure these performance indicators and how will they do it?
• How can performance indicators be integrated into the standard processes by which departments set budget priorities?

What You’ll Do

The fellow will work closely with the mayor-president’s policy advisor and chief administrative officer to develop recommendations on how Lafayette can integrate performance measures into its capital planning and delivery processes. In addition, the fellow will work with one city department to prototype, test, and implement key performance indicators to guide its capital improvement work. To do this, the fellow will take stock of what data departments currently use in capital budgeting and study best practices in peer cities. The fellow will collaborate closely with internal stakeholders including the mayor’s office, department heads, and some frontline staff. Outside of city hall, the fellow may accompany the mayor for related engagements with members of the city and parish councils, as well as state legislators and the public.

Key actions and deliverables include:

• Draft recommendations on what data sources to use for project ideation, evaluation, and prioritization, based on consultation with department staff on what data is currently used, research on what data is used in other communities, and consultation with IT on optimal data format and storage.
• For a single city department, draft recommendations on which key performance indicators should be included in decision-making processes, prioritization of outputs and outcomes, and budgetary requests.
• For the same department, standardize the use of key performance indicators for project ideation, evaluation, and prioritization, and create processes for storing, calculating, and updating the data.

What You’ll Bring

The fellow will be expected to possess the following skills:

• Data Analysis
• Design Thinking
• Policy Analysis
• Process Mapping
• Mapping (GIS)
• Qualitative Interviewing and Analysis

Apply here

Back to Summer Fellowships page