Public Management in Service Delivery

The provision of public services such as healthcare, education, sanitation and criminal justice is a responsibility of the federal government in America. In addition, it is the governments’ duty to deliver the services and let the public manage it since the people are tax payers and they need to see how their tax money is spent in providing various services to them. Cemetery services is a major concern for people in various states and thus the various policies placed to guide their use and access is important to the American citizen. This paper expands more on the role that some public management mechanisms have played in recent public delivery services and the theory that it adapted to its failure and uses cemetery services as a benchmark. Cemetery Services Different parts of United States are covered with services that concern the burial ceremonies.

The services are usually taken by the public management authority that take care of the cemetery and plan on the way the services will be effective. Currently, the service corp international has been able to incorporate various cemetery services and it owns more than 372 cemeteries in 43 states where they offer better services that affect positively on the American citizens (Longoria, 360). With few legislation fees, a cemetery earns money from the sales of a site and from the maintenance fee which is usually not costly. The major challenges that affect this service is that increase of death rates leads to inadequate of space and the sales of the grave sites reduces but the maintenance fee usually remains constant. In addition, there are private cemetery services which offer better services than the public ones and this affects the effectiveness of the public services like the cemeteries.

The mechanisms charges less fee on cremation since there is no maintenance fee like the grave site. Most states adopted the mechanism 2 in delivering the interments in its operations. This mechanism involved joint contract venture and tenders of strategic partnering. The strategic partnership includes a free contract of incentives such as disposal of public land at a lower discount. The contract was to promote public commercial development. This has brought a bigger challenge in terms of spacing in the public cemeteries places (Wickersham, 62). The experimenting of the public management policies with redesigning parts of the system to the citizens played an active role as a user community for the public services. This was achieved through the participation of forums, public monitoring of the budgets and the new forms of commissioning. On the other hand, the private sector is performing better and this lays a foundation for competition where the economic stable people in the society move to the private sector where services are much better than the public cemetery services.

In addition, the public managed cemeteries have poor maintenance in hygiene, town planning and fail to state over site for accounts. This made the company’s request for funds in order to manage the cemeteries since they are a business and their aim was to make profit. The rules laid by the government on matters concerning the public interest made the companies to deflect from the offers due to the returns were not high as expected. With this, the government neglected to allocate funds for cemeteries and hence the public management and the theory deeply failed (Osborne, Stephen P. Zoe Radnor, and Greta Nasi, 150). Conclusion Public services have failed in America since the public has been put as the custodian of the services and make policies concerning the management without funds allocated by the national budget in support of the services.

nd April 2018. Osborne, Stephen P. Zoe Radnor, and Greta Nasi. A new theory for public service management? Toward a (public) service-dominant approach. The American Review of Public Administration 43.