Numbers? Oh yeah, we’ve got numbers.

Or at least city commissioners soon will have. Commissioners on Thursday gave city staff members approval to move ahead with a new management system that will require city departments to meet a much larger amount of numerical-based goals.

“A lot of our discussions on performance are more anecdotal,” said interim City Manager David Corliss. “We hear discussions, for example, about it takes too long to get something through the planning process. But we don’t have the data to prove that. Now we’ll have the data.”

The system, called performance management, will set goals for how various city departments perform on a variety of tasks ranging from spurring economic development to dealing with environmental issues.

Here’s a look at how it would work: Under the category of planned growth, commissioners would be taking measurements such as the percentage of development plans that staff members review within 60 days or less, the percentage of building permits that inspectors issue within five days of application, and the average number of hours of continuing education that planners receive during the course of a year.

In the category of economic development, the measurements may be numbers such as the business vacancy rate in the community or the average income of residents.

Commissioners will set goals for each of the measurement categories and review them at least once per year to determine whether the city is meeting the goals.

“The only bad thing about this system will be that it will make it harder to rely on urban myths and assumptions,” said City Commissioner David Schauner. “We’re going to have to deal with those pesky facts.”

Work on creating the specific goals likely won’t begin until next year. That’s because commissioners want to gather data from 2006 to get a better picture of where the city stands before setting goals.

The data-gathering process likely will include an annual survey of city residents. Many of the areas that city administrators want to manage involve measuring the “customer satisfaction” levels of residents.

Commissioners in the next few weeks are expected to receive estimates on how much a survey would cost to conduct.