About
three years ago the Governor and General Assembly
created the Council for Virginia’s Future to
review state government and “measure
Virginia’s current performance, prioritize our
future goals and establish metrics to help measure
our progress toward meeting those goals.”
Laudable goals for sure.
Nearly
three-quarters of the Council is made up of
members of the General Assembly and the
administration. These are all fine people, but
many are not known as “change agents” and have
no truly compelling reason to significantly alter
what they helped create.
At
the Council’s May 12th meeting on strategic
planning and performance based budgeting, actions
were taken can be charitably described only as
“the first steps” toward real reform. Having
traveled the country, working with elected
officials in over a dozen states, I can safely say
that what has been proposed to date by the Council
for Virginia’s Future will not provide the
necessary management tools so badly needed.
The
most critical tool for better management is the
state budget document. Our current one is so
totally incomprehensible that it must be
dramatically improved if true change is to have a
chance (see the Thomas Jefferson Institute’s
study in October 2003 on
its website).
According
to the Council’s website, the May meeting
produced a report that outlines its vision and
recommendations for what the Commonwealth’s
budget should look like and how performance
measures should be included in the future. While
this is a good start, the proposed budget changes
fall well short of what is needed.
After
reading this proposed “new budget document,”
one wonders how closely this Council reviewed the
budgets that other states have crafted to bring
much better management to the state. Several key
components are missing from the Council’s draft
plan.
First,
programs and activities are not evaluated on an
individual basis. They continue to be lumped
together. This prohibits use of true
performance-based budgeting that allocates dollars
only to those programs that achieve the greatest
results. Unfortunately without this link,
the Council’s initial purpose cannot be
achieved.
Secondly,
the measures and data the Council recommends
don’t give the user any sense of relative
performance. They simply identify current
operational levels and performance. While some
historical data is presented, no benchmarks are
offered to guide the user as to what goals are to
be achieved. And there are no references to how
the Commonwealth measures up against neighboring
states.
While
contextual data isn’t necessary to see
performance improvements within the state, it does
put things into perspective by revealing whether
the Commonwealth is gaining ground or falling
relative to our neighbors.
Third,
there is no cost per unit of services provided.
Admittedly, the Council-proposed budget document
is a work in progress. But if such data is not
part of this “new and improved” management
tool, it will fall far short of what is needed.
This noticeable void suggests that critical
performance and efficiency information may not be
part of any budgetary recommendations.
While
these three deficiencies are significant, they can
be easily fixed. The budget provided at the May
12th meeting is a working draft and changes can
and will likely be made. The Council’s work has
made significant progress and it should be
commended for improving the Commonwealth’s
current opaque budget process.
The
Council should review the budgets of North
Carolina, Texas, Florida, and California, to name
a few, to see what these states provide to the
legislators, managers and to the public.
Beyond
making the changes suggested above, the Council
should consider other mechanisms to bring more
transparency, accountability, and performance to
the Commonwealth’s government. While
administering the U.S. Office of Management and
Budget, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels initiated an
innovative performance-based budgeting review, the
Program Assessment Rating Tool or “PART.” He
has taken that to Indiana and has begun
implementing a similar initiative. Virginia can
and should follow these two efforts with one of
its own.
Another
option is creating a type of sunset commission to
review programs and activities for relevancy and
performance. This proposed commission would
operate similarly to the Base Realignment and
Closure commission (BRAC) whose recommendations
are given a straight up or down vote. Such a
procedure would remove the influence of individual
special interests and require legislators to
review the proposal as a whole.
The
Council for Virginia’s Future can dramatically
increase its impact by shoring up the performance
based budgeting piece of its proposal. It would be
a shame if the Council missed this opportunity to
offer real change.
--October
17, 2005
|