Grading the States introduction THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT Report Card: Florida GOVERNOR Jeb Bush (Republican, elected 1998) LEGISLATURE House — 77 Republicans, 43 Democrats Senate — 25 Republicans, 15 Democrats FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: B There are no chads in Florida’s budgeting process. The state uses a system of non-partisan revenue estimating, under which a special committee meets weekly during sessions of the legislature to track any impact that legislation is having on the state’s revenues. Expenditures aren’t monitored quite so well; it would be beneficial if that process were handled with similarly resolute effort. For the moment, the state’s financial management technology also hampers the ability of managers to do the analysis they’d like. Basic information about the state’s contracts, for example, is not easily available for decision makers. Efforts are being made to better measure the performance of individual contractors. Florida has a new process for measuring the affordability of its debt. This is a critical issue here, since the amount of state debt has risen from $5.8 billion a decade ago to about $18 billion now. CAPITAL MANAGEMENT: B- In the past, critics have complained that the legislature didn’t take Florida’s capital planning process seriously enough. That seems to be changing. Legislation passed last year requires agencies to prepare long-term plans, with detailed information on proposed capital projects. The fact that this was a legislative initiative gives some credence to the hope that the new plans will get buy-in from the legislators. On the transportation side, Florida’s capital planning is already strong. A statewide transportation plan establishes long-range (20-25 year) and short-range (1-10 year) goals, objectives and strategies. The DOT does a particularly good job tying together the two efforts. Some of the state’s facilities — those covered by the so-called Florida Facilities Pool — are well maintained. But agencies not covered by that umbrella struggle for funds, and their deferred maintenance grows. The governor recommended special funding to help alleviate the problem, but the legislature turned it down. The issue will likely be revisited in the next year. HUMAN RESOURCES: B- Florida has been an extremely decentralized HR state, with little consistency in hiring, training or discipline of employees. The central personnel office is now trying to take back some of the control and responsibility that was lost over the years. “It’s time for the agencies to see that they’re not 28 separate employers anymore,” says Sharon Larson, director of the division of human resource management. Coordinated work-force planning was begun last year, and several improvements have been made in recruiting. For example, Florida now has the capacity to accept online applications, which many other states are moving toward as well. Florida has been moving aggressively to a new competency-based HR structure, which would transform all major HR systems, including classification, recruitment, performance appraisal and training. The idea is to define the knowledge, skills and attributes necessary for each position — an enormous project. This would enable the state to recruit the best possible people for its needs, pay what jobs are worth, and evaluate and reward employee performance based on the specific competencies crucial for each position. The project has been temporarily put on hold pending the 2001 legislative session. MANAGING FOR RESULTS: B+ In 1994, Florida established an Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability to oversee the process of developing performance measures, to evaluate their use and to conduct program reviews. The agency has done a very good job, and as a result the state now has one of the most comprehensive sets of measures to be found anywhere in the country. Almost all of the agencies have bought into the process. What’s more, the state does extremely well at validating the measures once they are prepared. Agencies are now working to improve their performance measures and develop activity-based costing. Although legislative budgeting is still done on a line-item basis, in the next round of budget preparation, the agencies will be making the effort to do their own budgets based on specific measures. The governor has advanced a package of seven strategic priorities as the core of his plan for the future, but the plan isn’t very detailed or complete. “It’s marginal,” says one close observer. At the agency level, strategic planning efforts are improving. Unlike a couple of years ago, there is now a significant effort to standardize the process from agency to agency. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: C+ No state is working harder than Florida to centralize its IT efforts. The legislature has established a substantive IT task force for the first time. The governor has signed legislation formally creating a CIO position and a state technology office. The state is taking all the IT staff budgets from the agencies and pulling them together. “Governor Bush is committed to the fact that the state needs to run like an enterprise,” says CIO Roy Cales. “Up until now, we’ve been run like 40 mid-sized businesses.” When completed, the central IT agency will have a budget of between $800 million and $1.2 billion. The state is also working on a standardization process; sometime next year it hopes to have developed an enterprise architecture. But a lot remains to be done. Florida’s enterprise-wide systems are still very troublesome, with separate stand-alone systems operating on different data centers. As a result, there’s insufficient management-level information, duplication of data and effort, and high maintenance costs. Florida’s going to have to live with this for a few years, but it’s in the early stages of bringing in an integrated financial management system that will pull all its enterprise-wide systems up to date for between $200 million and $300 million. AVERAGE GRADE: B- Copyright © 2001, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.