by James A. Bacon

It’s refreshing to see that legacy media are still capable of publishing articles about the nuts and bolts of good government, a topic that once was a preoccupation of local journalists but no longer seems to be. Michael Martz, an old-timer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, wrote an informative article today about Governor Glenn Youngkin’s record in making state government more efficient and more responsive to citizens.

Early in his administration, Youngkin hired a “chief transformation officer” to tackle problems that needed tackling. Team Youngkin achieved several successes that, until Martz took note of them, have received little visibility.

• The Department of Motor Vehicles has slashed average wait times from 37 minutes to 10 minutes;
• The Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) has dug out from more than 1.3 million “work items,” including a backlog of 700,00 inherited from former Governor Ralph Northam after COVID-19 shutdowns threw hundreds of thousands of Virginians out of work;
• The state has saved $106 million, about 75% of it from renegotiating IT contracts that were “poorly priced or structured” instead of allowing them to renew automatically;
• The administration is reviewing 5,000 other state contracts, and Youngkin aspires to $200 million in annual savings.

State Senator Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, has some criticisms and questions about other government-transformation efforts.

“Has the transformation officer produced the kind of long-haul savings for the commonwealth that are going to outlast those four years? I don’t see that happening,” he told the Times-Dispatch.

It’s not clear from the article what Deeds proposes as an alternative.

Deeds and other Democrats sought to make the Department of General Services independent of the executive branch after the Youngkin administration pushed to reduce procurement costs.

Democrats, explains Martz, remain angry at Youngkin’s decision last year to ignore the legislature’s instruction in the state budget to build a new state office building near the General Assembly office complex in Richmond. Some are unhappy also about plans to move portions of the Virginia Department of Transportation offices to a less expensive suburban location.

Sounds like sour grapes to me. If the GSA is independent of the executive branch, to whom is it accountable? Legislators? Seriously?

Dems also have criticized the involvement of Virginia’s former chief transformation officer with the ABC authority in making revenue and profit forecasts based upon expectations of generating operating savings. ABC has experienced lower profits in recent years. Those profits flow into the General Fund, and legislators count on reliable estimates for their own budgeting purposes. Eh. OK.

The last time Virginia paid serious attention to cutting costs and taxes was the 1990s. In the midst of a recession, L. Douglas Wilder managed to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap without raising taxes. A Wilder-appointed commission dug deep into the state’s cost structure and made recommendations for saving hundreds of millions of dollars, some of which, though not all, were adopted. His successor, George Allen, made cost cutting a priority as well, and Allen’s successor Jim Gilmore cut the car tax. But the cost/tax-cutting imperative lost steam in the 2000s, when Virginia saw a series of tax increases and “budget enhancements.” Over the past two decades, Virginia has evolved from a low/moderate-tax state to a moderate tax state. Youngkin is the first governor in recent memory to prioritize the twin goals of cutting costs and holding the line on tax increases — and he’s done so in the absence of a recession and revenue shortfalls to spur action.

Conservatives are understandably frustrated about Youngkin’s modest success in taming the leviathan, but at least he’s nudging the state in the right direction. I wish he could move faster, but the political realities in 2024 are what they are. Could anyone else do any better?