ALGA is an organization that means a lot to me and I wanted to share some of my thoughts about ALGA and then present some of ALGA's historical trends.

Waxing Nostalgic

I've been working as a local government auditor for almost exactly nine years (March 15th, 1999 was my first day as an auditor for the City of Austin). At first, my connection to ALGA was fairly remote. I heard about ALGA quite a bit because the Austin City Auditor at the time, Helen Niesner, was the president of ALGA in 1999-2000. But since the only people active in ALGA were managers, ALGA struck me as an organization for the higher ups. My only routine interaction with ALGA was in preparing and submitting audit abstracts (which did involve tracking down a copy of the most recent Quarterly to get the address to send abstracts to, which was not always an easy task) and searching for abstracts from similar projects on the ALGA website at the beginning of audit projects. I'm not sure when exactly it occurred to me that the Quarterly actually had timely, relevant articles about my job, but at some point I did realize that and it joined the stack of work magazines I routinely read (or at least skim).

It took a little longer for me to realize that ALGA the organization, in addition to the Quarterly, was extremely relevant to me too. I began to realize ALGA's relevance when I worked on my first peer review in 2005. Through that review I got to interact with Bill Greene from the Peer Review Committee and I met Mark Petterson and Renee Beckham, who were the other members of the review team. I realized pretty quickly that Mark, Renee, and I were professional peers and talking to them about how they did things in their shops (not to mention exploring the breweries of Pennsylvania) convinced me that I actually had a lot in common with other local government auditors.

I can't remember exactly how it went after that, but I started talking to our Deputy at the time Colleen Waring about becoming more active in ALGA (especially after I was appointed as an audit manager and one of my performance expectations was to be ‘active in a professional organization'). Not long after that in late 2005 I think, someone else in our office was asked about taking on the editor role for the Quarterly (or maybe at that point the Communications Committee had already been conceptualized and it was for the chair of the new committee). Anyway, I volunteered and Colleen put me in touch with Harriet Richardson who ALGA's president at the time. Not much later I took on the chair position and met all of the members of the board (plus Gary Blackmer) in person at a board meeting in Lexington. Again I was impressed with how much at home I felt with the fairly diverse group of local government auditors that formed ALGA's leadership (and I was especially impressed when a couple of them joined me on an adventure to locate a brewery I'd researched and wanted to check out...we never found the brewery, but we did find a nice tavern where I got to try out some Kentucky brews). My connection to ALGA has been subsequently reaffirmed by my work with amazing volunteers through the Communications Committee, another peer review, and two ALGA conferences where I've met great people, learned new things, and explored common issues. I've also learned to play the dice game 41-24 with Mike Edmonds and picked up great phrases like "I wouldn't kick a 22 out of bed".

I have a feeling that a lot of ALGA members felt like I did when they realized there was a professional organization specifically for them...and I hope that in the future more local government auditors are able to find and get involved with ALGA and take advantage of the resources ALGA offers.

Looking back at some trends, you can see that ALGA has grown significantly over the last 20 years in terms of membership, types of services offered, and more. A couple more thoughts from me before I actually show you the trends...Gary Blackmer mentioned in his column in the last Quarterly that auditors have a lot in common with historians (see the Opportunities for Improvement column in the December 2007 LGAQ for more on this topic). I don't know about the rest of you, but I know that I get excited about research and history and they are probably both part of what attracted me to auditing in the first place. I know this is ultra-nerdy and it may take a minute for the relevance to become apparent so bare with me a minute. I've recently spent over a year digging into the history of my east Austin house and neighborhood, tracking back to the original family that built the house (literally...by hand) and digging up details about their life in Austin in the 30s and 40s. As I've done this research I've occasionally run into a dead end because someone with key information is no longer around to provide it. When you're as far into the research as I am, it can be a really frustrating experience, especially when most of the neighborhood's memory is undocumented. That experience makes it even more important for me to give extra credit to the ALGA History Project, completed in 2001 by members of the Education Committee. Their work made pulling together this anniversary edition of the Quarterly so much easier and so much less daunting. And, as I read through the ALGA History project I realized that unlike many organizations, ALGA has done an amazing job of continuing to provide what it set out to provide--a forum for local government auditors to share knowledge and network as well as an organization to advocate for government accountability--while still keeping current on issues impacting members and expanding to meet additional needs.

The rest of this piece will walk you through some visual information depicting ALGA then and now.

Membership
As evidenced by the maps on the following pages, ALGA is an organization that has grown both in number and in territory covered since its foundation. While I don't have exact numbers for every year (since 2005 ALGA has offered organization-based membership rather than individual membership), ALGA is definitely a growing organization. Some of the growth may be attributable to the fact that audit shops are growing but ALGA's outreach to new members is certainly another factor.

Conferences
The annual ALGA conference has been held in locations across the United States and was held in Canada once. The cover for this March 2008 Local Government Auditing Quarterly showcases photos of the city or county buildings in the 19 cities where ALGA conferences have been held since 1989. The graphic below provides the name of each place represented on the cover and the photo credit and provides some trivia about Philadelphia's City Hall.

Peer Reviews
ALGA conducted its first peer review in Milwaukee County in 1990 and since then ALGA has conducted one or more review of almost 80 organizations.

Awards
ALGA first gave the Lennis Knighton Award for ‘best audit' in 1996 (given for projects completed in 1995). Since that time 21 audit shops have won one or more Knighton Awards.

SOURCE: 2001 N.A.L.G.A. History Project Report; ALGA website.