Carl DeMaio will return to The Performance Institute, the Washington-based think tank he founded 15 years ago, to work on government reform and innovation, the group announced Thursday.
But he won’t be leaving San Diego, said institute spokeswoman Laverne Murach.
“He is staying there,” Murach told Times of San Diego. “Everyone in San Diego can rest assured of that. With all the snow out here, I don’t know why he’d want to.”
DeMaio, the former councilman who fell short in San Diego’s mayoral election in 2012 and lost last year in a bruising battle to unseat Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, will be a senior fellow at the institute.
“My entire career has been focused on improving the performance and transparency of government at all levels,” DeMaio said. “I’m excited to return to The Performance Institute and look forward to continuing this very important work.”
DeMaio was with the institute when he came to San Diego during the height of the city’s fiscal crisis and proposed a series of reforms. He joined the City Council in 2008.
The institute issued a statement crediting DeMaio with helping to “define and implement a series of reforms that helped save (San Diego) from bankruptcy while improving service quality to citizens. DeMaio has authored numerous reform proposals at the federal, state, and local levels of government and guided the successful implementation of those proposals with both elected and career officials.”
DeMaio will spearhead the institute’s Transition to Governance 2016 Initiative that will feature a series of town hall forums designed to develop federal management reform recommendations for the next administration to consider. He led a similar project after he founded the organization in 2000.
According to a 2012 report in Voice of San Diego, DeMaio turned a business of organizing conferences into The Performance Institute.
“He entered an empty field and declared himself the best in the field,” the website quoted one associate as saying, and noted that by 2005, “10,000 people a year came to Performance Institute seminars, 95 percent of whom were government workers.”
Voice continued:
When DeMaio sold The Performance Institute in 2007, it reportedly had 65 employees and its annual revenues reached $10 million. DeMaio also sold a second company, the American Strategic Management Institute, which he had founded in 2003 to provide the same services to the private sector. He has said that company eventually became the more profitable of the two.
“We are thrilled to welcome Carl back to The Performance Institute,” said Diane Denholm, executive director of PI. “We look forward to Carl’s insight and passion as we build on the foundational vision of PI to address the evolving challenges faced by today’s government leaders.”
The organization labels itself “a private, nonpartisan think tank seeking to improve government performance through the principles of performance, accountability and transparency.”
— City News Service contributed to this report.