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The B&G Report
By Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene
June 2008
Read any good books lately? We're trying to assemble a suggested reading list for government managers. Please share your suggestions, which can refer to books new, old or in-between. And feel free to be very broad-minded in your suggestions. It may be, for instance, that Machiavelli's The Prince is more useful than the latest text.
Email us with your recommendations!
We've been picking up news from around the country about a squeeze on state highway patrol budgets — notably those which rely on the gas tax for funding. But the following is a good-news item, not a bad-news item, in that it shows how tight budget times can often spark improved management.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, "The solution isn't as simple as writing more tickets, or raising fines for traffic offenses.... [But the] patrol already is taking a few steps to save money."
Notable of the steps: The state "has reduced overtime for dispatchers by piloting a system that allows dispatchers in neighboring patrol posts to absorb extra work from an especially busy post. The Mansfield dispatch center, the first to use the new arrangement, saw its overtime costs decrease 74 percent in the six-month period ending in April, patrol officials said."
We've always thought that a four-day work week sounded like a great idea, and we recall a smattering of companies trying it out around 30 years ago. While we haven't been gathering information on the idea, it's become a hot notion in a growing number of cities. Effective July 1, for example, Birmingham, Alabama, is going to a four-day work week for about 4,000 employees. They'll all work four 10-hour days. The impetus? High gas prices.
As the city's mayor, Larry Langford, was quoted in the Birmingham News, "We are going to make sure that City Hall is open five days a week. You won't see any interruptions to city services of any kind. All departments will be fully staffed, only we'll be working a lot harder and smarter."
This isn't going to be easy, we predict, and we can hardly imagine the kinds of scheduling issues Birmingham is about to confront. But we think that this is the kind of imaginative thinking in which cities should engage. And we wish Birmingham the best of luck. We'll keep track, and keep you posted on its progress.
Last month we expressed our enthusiasm for maps as great ways to communicate a vast amount of government information in an easy-to-interpret format. Steve Gorcester, director of the Transportation Improvement Board in Washington State, wrote to agree, and suggested we take a look at the board's work online. We did, and were pretty impressed. Be sure to check out the city mapping functions under the Project Information tab.
Acronyms can be interesting — particularly when they're unintentional. For years, the Minnesota Department of Employee Relations had a most appropriate acronym: DOER. But now that department has been thoroughly reorganized, and the result is much less innocuous.
Under the reorganization, employees have been shifted to other state agencies. Many were moved to the Finance Department, which will now be known as Finance and Employee Relations. Or FIER.
Whether you pronounce that as "fire" or "fear," it sounds pretty ominous.
As a growing number of cities and states begin to recognize that obesity is genuinely a major threat to public health and a major cost for them, they need look no further than their own back yards for evidence.
A recent study by Chicago-based CareerBuilder.com compared average weight gains in a variety of fields. Overall, some 45 percent of workers said they had gained weight at their current jobs. The second-highest category? Government employees. Some 52 percent of folks who work in the public sector said they gained weight on their jobs. Number one on the list were financial services employees, 53 percent of whom gained weight. At the opposite end of the spectrum, only 36 percent of retail employees gained weight at their current jobs.
How much does technology get in the way of progress? We recently asked this question in the B&G Report and got some very interesting responses. One that we particularly liked came from Tony Longo, deputy director in charge of the Performance Measurement Group in the New York City Mayor's Office of Operations. He wrote:
"The main example for me is information that used to be obtained over the phone, either in person or with recorded messages — and is now "easily accessible" through the web. Whimsical website structures, frequent changes, and poorly-thought-out query logic can have you spending hours looking for stats (e.g. weather histories, labor stats, or some version of the CPI) - where in the dim past (10 years ago) all you needed was a phone number."
On the same topic, the following came in from J. Timothy O'Toole, internal control officer of the New York State Office of Children & Family Services:
"A more serious side of the technology issue is staff who refuse to learn the new tools. We can spend thousands on auditor software (like ACL or TeamMate), only to then fall back on good old Excel to do the real work, because the special software requires expensive training and lost productivity time. And despite the fact that we've been using the MS Office suite for years, out of 65 staff in our operation, there are only 5 who could be deemed professionally competent to use these tools."
Quote of the Month from Gary R. Pike, executive director of information management and institutional research at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, he tells the officials in his organization: "I'll know that you really understand what assessment is about when you come to me and say, 'We had this problem. Here's what we tried. We assessed it. It failed miserably. And here's what we're going to do differently next time.'"
One of the biggest reasons people don't want to use performance measurements is that they fear the information will be misused — by the press, the legislature, special-interest groups and so on. No question, there is no information so clear that it isn't open to different interpretations. Look at the endless discussion over what the Founding Fathers really meant to communicate in the Constitution.
This came to mind as we were reading an online discussion about measuring absenteeism rates in public-sector organizations. One perspective seemed to be that these are important numbers for human resource people to understand: When people don't come to work, for whatever reason, productivity is reduced and expenses go up.
On the other hand, the argument was raised that most all absentees stay home for perfectly permissible reasons (illness, personal days, etc.) and that these measures may be used exclusively as a weapon against employees — without regard to employers' role in creating an environment that leads to greater absenteeism.
These are tricky issues. We tend to believe that more information is always good — and that the hard work in trying to ensure that it's used appropriately is worth the effort.
"Mayor Thomas M. Menino is suspending the city's public works director for three weeks," wrote the Boston Globe in late May, "after city officials discovered that one of his top aides collected a city paycheck for five months while living 2,205 miles away, in Venezuela."
We don't know anything about this particular issue other than what we read in the Globe, so we won't make any comments on the specifics of the case.
Our only question is this: How effective is suspending high-level employees as a punitive measure? We never thought it made much sense in high school. Doesn't the city wind up with all kinds of bureaucratic issues when a key player is absent for weeks at a time? Do decisions wind up unmade? Do decisions wind up being remade when the employee returns? Any thoughts out there?
The debate over the appropriate use of privatization is hot and impassioned. We've spoken to experts who have been looking at these deals for years now, who freely concede that they don't have any idea of right or wrong in this area. It would be foolish of us to mount any kind of vigorous argument one way or another, without months or years of research.
That said, we just ran across a piece in the Star Press of Muncie, Indiana, that provoked an immediate reaction. According to the article, by Nick Werner, Muncie Mayor Sharon McShurley "is considering privatizing fire protection or utilizing volunteer firefighters to compensate for expected shortfalls in property tax revenues.... 'Why wouldn't we if we can provide public safety to the city for less?' she asked."
A fair question, but we have a handful more: What happens if the company you've given over fire services to goes out of business? Who's going to put out the flames until a new contractor is found? Given the police-like authority that fire fighters have in some situations, do you really want to hand over those badges to private business? How can you set up a fair system to compensate for fire prevention — a crucial area that is extremely difficult to measure?
Harley Duncan is one of the smartest, nicest people we know. As executive director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, we've worked with him for years. Not only is he extremely knowledgeable about every aspect of tax management, he has been willing to collaborate with us on efforts that simply couldn't have been accomplished without the cooperation of the FTA. Harley is heading to a new job with KPMG that will keep him front and center in state tax issues — and that's very good news. Still, we have to admit to a selfish sadness at his departure from FTA.
As managers try to grapple with employee pension costs, many of the debates center around the level and kind of benefits offered. But there's an awful lot that can be done with better management. One small but illuminating example from the Chicago Sun-Times deals with a loophole that lets legislators in some states grossly inflate their pensions — if only they can get a job in the executive branch for a short while.
"Gov. Blagojevich had no idea one of his top allies, retired state Sen. Carol Ronen, stood to add $38,000 a year to her government pension when he gave her a job she held for eight weeks.... Ronen, a 63-year-old Democrat from Chicago, is Blagojevich's onetime Senate floor leader. The governor hired her as a $120,000-a-year senior adviser on March 1, but she left on April 30 to become a volunteer for presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The job Blagojevich gave her allowed her to increase her pension from $64,005 to $102,000 annually.... Though Ronen did a 'great job' in her brief time working for him, Blagojevich said he would support efforts to revoke so-called pension golden parachutes."
Along the same lines, when states search for ways to save money on health care for their citizens, the first stop is often a close examination of benefits to see where cutbacks might help. We've long argued — somewhat inspired by Don Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania — that they should first look toward managerial sloppiness as a way to save cash.
Just consider the problems recently revealed by state auditors in Colorado. It seems the state program that administers health care to more than 53,000 needy children and pregnant women is grossly disorganized. The auditors discovered that roughly one out of every 10 health-care recipients was classified incorrectly, according to an article in the Rocky Mountain News. Some of them were thought to be eligible for benefits when they weren't. For others, it was the other way around. The report didn't come up with a dollar figure, but incorrectly classifying 10 percent of program recipients is a staggeringly high number.
"We can do a better job with respect to how we organize our eligibility enrollment activities and we're doing that as we speak," Sue Williamson, deputy director of the Health Care Policy Department, told the News.
We feel pretty confident that Colorado is not unusual. It may, in fact, be luckier than other states, in that its auditor is checking into this kind of thing.
A couple of weeks ago, the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School announced finalists for its 2008 Innovations in American Government Awards competition. According to a press statement, "These programs are models of government excellence, representing innovative programming from the local, county, city, tribal, state, and federal levels." Some of the finalists that focused on management caught our attention. Here are a couple we thought would be of interest to you:
Division of Youth Services; State of Missouri — The idea here is to sidestep the large institutional facilities that historically were used to help stop juvenile delinquents from becoming adult delinquents. Missouri is establishing small centers that focus on intense treatment, education and family and community engagement. It's demonstrated some very powerful results so far.
Knowledge Management; Commonwealth of Virginia — This effort should be of interest to all states, cities and counties as they try to make sure that the smart, experienced employees pass on their institutional knowledge to the next generation. Knowledge Management supports the Virginia Department of Transportation by strengthening its ability to share critical knowledge and experiences of its employees to improve ongoing processes and products.
Research Assistant: Heather Kleba