PERRYVILLE AND PERRY COUNTY RATE HIGH IN NATIONAL COMPARISON

PERRYVILLE -- A Texas-based government analyst recently rated Perryville and Perry County in the top 10 percent of local governments nationwide in terms of their effective use of financial resources.

Municipal Analysis Services Inc. of Austin, Texas studied more than 14,000 cities and counties nationwide this year, and Perryville and Perry County were among the 1,218 rated "high performance governments."

Municipal Analysis Services is a publishing company that plans to publish the top local governments annually.

Greg Michels, president of the company, said in order to publish a list of cities and counties with efficient government, the firm first had to research governments across the nation.

"There are a lot of books around that list the best places to live," Michels said. "Well, that's really subjective as far as the criteria they use.

"But when you look at financial management, there are some fairly objective criteria. What we hope to do is publish a list of efficiently managed cities and counties. Why not let people know which governments are doing a good job?"

Michels said a "high performance government" is considered "stable and efficient" based on five primary criteria: diversified revenues; high employee productivity; controlled department-by-department expenses; careful use of federal and state aid; and use and control of debt.

"We did this study to find cities and counties that manage their finances effectively," Michels said. "The result is an objective list of governments that are financially fair to their citizens while being more financially stable.

"Perry County managers are doing one of the best jobs with the resources they have."

A score of 60 percent or better is needed for a government to be considered "high performance." Scores for area governments included in the Michels' study are:

20Perryville, 67 percent.

20Perry County, 60 percent.

Cape Girardeau city, 55 percent.

Scott County, 52 percent.

20Bollinger County, 41 percent.

Perryville City Administrator Craig Lindsley said he was pleased with Perryville's high rating.

"We're always trying to analyze our systems all the time to see if we can be more effective and more efficient," Lindsley said. "Frankly, I'm very pleased. That's a tremendous testimony to the whole staff and the elected officials of Perryville.

Lindsley said he was unfamiliar with Municipal Analysis Services, but added that the company's status as an independent research firm lends credibility to their findings.

"We try to run a tight ship and keep a tight reign over things, so obviously I'm pleased that this firm has rated us so highly," he said.

Michels said the city and county governments were rated on a scale according to their size.

"We compared each government entity with others in about 17 different areas of management and then each of those areas is scored relative to others in its size group in the state," Michels said.

"We're not going to compare a really small town to a large one, where there's higher quality and more managers, and cities over 100,000 population are automatically compared with cities over 100,000 across the United States."

Cape Girardeau City Manager J. Ronald Fischer said the city's relatively high ranking only five percentage points below the "high performance" ranking speaks well of all the city's various departments.

"It speaks well of all our department heads," Fischer said. "I think it has to be a combination of all the departments for the total to rank up there near the top.

"It's nice to be ranked that high among all the other cities of our size."

Fischer said that the city also was recognized in a publication about two years ago as one of the top 20 cities of its size to reside. Cape Girardeau also is listed in "The Best Towns in America," published in 1983.

"This, of course, is another feather in our caps that we can point to and say this is a good place to live," he said.