GOVERNOR
Gary Locke (Democrat, elected 1996)
LEGISLATURE
House — 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans
Senate — 25 Democrats, 24 Republicans
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: B+
Spending limits and voter initiatives make budgeting tough in Washington. With double-digit health care increases added to the mix, the next biennial budget will be a particular challenge. Finance officials expect to draw the unrestricted general fund balance down by nearly $400 million and the emergency reserve fund by more than $200 million. Meanwhile, the state faces pressures from local governments to make up money that they lost due to the removal of a motor vehicle excise tax. The fee cut was passed by voters in 1999, thrown out by the courts and later reenacted by the legislature. Several more initiatives were passed this November that limit budgeting flexibility. For example, one calls for automatic cost-of-living adjustments for teachers. Another limits property-tax growth.
Basic financial management continues to be excellent, with top-notch financial reporting and good investment practices. The state is a pioneer in doing procurement through the Internet. Washington makes good use of performance measures in its contracts, utilizes master contracts aggressively and provides much training to managers in this area.
One interesting plan for the future: A training academy for financial managers. This would be designed to increase skills in cost accounting, educate employees about the voter-initiative process, prepare the state to handle turnover and more.
CAPITAL MANAGEMENT: A-
Washington does most things well in capital management. Its long-range plan, based on careful agency projections, goes out 10 years, making it one of the most far-reaching documents of its kind. The first six years of the plan are specific in nature; the rest anticipate future needs.
Capital projects almost always come in on time and on budget. That’s due in part to a three-step process of pre-design, design and construction. Each phase is funded separately. If an agency can finish a project under budget, it gets to keep the extra cash to fund improvements.
Coordination between legislative and executive branches is strong. Legislative staff participate informally in the planning process, and in recent years, legislators have made only slight modifications to the governor’s recommended budgets. At the same time, capital projects are tied tightly with overall strategic goals for the state.
The major weakness is in highway maintenance. The state ranks its roads according to seven service levels, A through F. By their own estimate, current maintenance is provided only at C level, with about $240 million in funding. The goal is to get up to B, which would require about $324 million.
HUMAN RESOURCES: A-
Washington has accelerated its work-force planning efforts with new employee surveys, more accessible demographic data and a succession-focused training program.
Training, in general, is a high priority. The state has sent in consultants to work on team-building, conflict resolution and process improvement in the work force. An academy has been set up to give managers and supervisors guidance in tricky personnel issues. Officials believe it has contributed to a 37 percent decline in new employment-related grievance claims.
Civil service rules aren’t the most flexible here, but the state works hard to find ways around them. Instead of using rigid test scores, it uses bands of scores (awarding all grades above 95 a top rating, for example). That gives managers more applicants to choose from.
MANAGING FOR RESULTS: A-
The decentralized structure here makes entity-wide strategic planning difficult. But the state has developed excellent goals and plans aimed at addressing cross-agency issues. Last spring, the governor released Washington’s first-ever enterprise-wide statement of goals and performance measures in support of his policy agenda. Meanwhile, agency-level strategic plans are improving as training efforts pay off.
Performance contracts between the agencies and the governor’s office are rippling downward, in an effort to reach the managers at the next level below, some of whom have not evidenced an understanding of the process. Agencies that demonstrate superior quality and efficiency win a Governor’s Award for Service.
The state is utilizing the “balanced scorecard,” an approach that examines outcomes across agencies to measure progress in achieving broad results.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: A
In the fast moving world of IT, no state does everything perfectly — not even Washington. The current fiscal problems have slowed down the arrival of the state-of-the-art enterprise-wide IT systems that are supposed to be coming.
That said, Washington is so good at so many things in this field that it sometimes seems to be playing in a different league from the other 49 states. It is unsurpassed in the use of portfolio management for IT acquisitions, and in the analysis of each new purchase to see how it impacts on the entirety of government information. Strategic planning has long been top-drawer and it is getting better. And while other decentralized states struggle with standardizing their IT architecture, it’s no problem here; exceptional working relationships exist among all three branches of state government and the Independent Information Services Board, which oversees IT matters.
Almost anything that can be done on the Internet, this state has tried doing there. Particularly impressive is “Transact Washington,” now being implemented. It will provide a seamless way for them to interact with dozens of applications, identifying themselves only once. “Once you are in, you never need a separate password or a way to deal with different agencies,” explains the state’s CIO, Steve Kolodney. “You are dealing with the state of Washington, which has a single face... No other state is anywhere near that as far as we can tell.” As Dizzy Dean once said, it isn’t bragging if you can do it.
AVERAGE GRADE: A-
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