Quality, transparency, sustainability: the Municipality of Grosseto is the first in Italy to submit to a public rating
GROSSETO. Quality, sustainability, transparency: in a word, ethics. The ethics of the administrative action of the Municipality of Grosseto will be verified through the public rating tool, promoted by the Ethics Foundation which launches a sort of "Tripadvisor" of the public administrations. The Maremma capital will therefore be the first Italian municipality to be subjected to this type of verification which provides for a grid with six macro-indicators made up overall of over eighty indicators which will fathom the folds of choices and acts of the institution to establish what really meets the criteria of quality, sustainability and transparency and what instead needs to be improved.
Therefore, the collaboration between the Municipality and the Ethics Foundation, announced in May and put in black and white in the memorandum of understanding signed in September, comes to life. «We are ready – says the mayor Emilio Bonifazi – to get involved through the controls of an authoritative independent body, because citizens rightly ask for transparency, but this must be certified, studied, demonstrated with authority. It is not enough to hold public meetings, vote online or make all the documents public, which we have already been doing for years; it is necessary that the ethical quality and the sustainability of the administrative action be confirmed by an independent and, above all, competent reality».
The councilor for quality policies and certifications, Arsenio Carosi, underlines that Grosseto is «the first municipality in Italy to really put itself in front of the mirror, in front of all citizens and on a multiplicity of aspects, not just financial ones. And we do it because we believe in the rules on transparency and we want to be among the first to take this step seriously through evaluations and qualitative indicators of our action».
"What can be done to strengthen and improve the public system?", he asks the vice president and director of the Ethical Foundation, Paola Caporossi. The answer is simple: «It is evaluated, just as it is done with children at school, and as businesses do. Evaluation is not a threat and it is not only critical: evaluation implies taking some responsibility, it requires a more mature participation. What we have done is not an academic exercise, but we would like it to become a civic tool, the public administration's Tripadvisor».
Citizens can participate through the public rating site (www.ratinpa.it) with a structured assessment, not a "vent" like Facebook can be. Everything will be examined by a series of macro indicators: the first economic and financial, but then governance, personnel, relations with citizens, relations with suppliers, the environment. And each macro-indicator contains many indicators, for a total of about eighty, to go beyond the formal transparency that the Municipalities should already practice.
The evaluation will be carried out by the experts of Fondazione Etica together with the personnel made available by Confindustria Grosseto and with volunteers from the diocesan Caritas, both partners of the Foundation
Ethics. An operation that for the Municipality of Grosseto is free of charge, but which within five months should already bring results, in the sense of being able to have indications on what the institution is doing in a virtuous way and what, instead , needs interventions to be improved.
(The Tyrrhenian Sea – 29 November 2015)
