Suburbanites have long been stereotyped as people obsessed with peeking over their neighbors' fences to make sure they're keeping up with the Joneses.

Now, suburban governments have a chance to scope each other out.

Several central Ohio communities are looking into a program that would standardize data collection and make it more accessible for comparisons. City managers say that could help them spot inefficiencies and spend taxpayer money more effectively.

A ranking of who spends the most on custodians probably wouldn't grace the cover of Money magazine, but city staffers are taking notes.

The International City/County Management Association is developing a Central Ohio Performance Measurement Consortium to help collect information.

"If you don't measure what you're doing, you can't tell whether you're doing well or not," said Gerald Young, a senior management associate for the ICMA Center for Performance Measurement.

Record keeping is not new, but the program would make information easier to analyze through comprehensive, standard formats.

New Albany and Dublin already are members of an ICMA program that allows them to compare themselves with other U.S. cities. The consortium would encourage more local municipalities to join at a discounted rate, and Young said that Westerville, Upper Arlington, Worthington, Delaware and Pataskala also have shown interest.

Westerville joined in 2000 but dropped the program after two years because almost no one else in Ohio was doing it, said Adam Maxwell , the city's administrative director.

But an increasing emphasis on accountability and transparency has made performance measurements more popular, said Anand Desai, a public-affairs professor at Ohio State University.

"In the public sector, you don't really measure by profit, so you need clear goals and benchmarks," he said.

Part of that is getting more precise data -- the cost of plowing one mile of snow, for example-- so a city can evaluate its practices year to year.

Lance Stewart, the facilities maintenance manager in Charlottesville, Va., said he got a shock when he found that the city's electricity costs were higher than those of several nearby communities.

"My first instinct was to call the other cities and say, 'Hey, did you report your data wrong?'  " Stewart said. "When it turned out to be true, the question was, 'Oh, then how are you doing it?'  "

He said the other cities shared tips that saved him 10 percent on electricity costs for some buildings.

Casper, Wyo., discovered that it had more police-car accidents than most cities, and it turned out that officials needed to redesign the garage to avoid fender-benders on city property.

Dublin hasn't finished sorting through its first year's worth of data, City Manager Terry Foegler said, but it's already giving the staff ideas.

Custodial costs looked high, so they're investigating whether there's an inefficiency or they just keep buildings cleaner than other cities do.

egibson@dispatch.com