By Alan Ehrenhalt

Joseph Heller would have loved this one: It sounds like it came straight out of the text of Catch 22.

The state of Maine, like many other states, has on its books a form of “sunset” law. Every one of its more than 100 boards and commissions is supposed to file a report each year documenting why it needs to remain in existence. If it fails to make the report, it is subject to being declared “inactive,” and officially terminated.

But here’s the Catch: Any board or commission that files the report is assumed to be active, and can’t be put out of business. That’s true even if all the report says is that they haven’t done a blessed thing all year. In other words, if they can summon up the energy to proclaim themselves useless, that’s considered proof of activity. Six commissions actually did this in 1999, and got extended for another year.

It wasn’t always quite this bad. At one time, the legislature had an Audit and Program Review Committee, which was charged with monitoring which of the state commissions actually performed necessary work. But in what appeared to be a fit of overzealous sunset enthusiasm, the legislators abolished the auditing panel rather than the groups it was auditing. So there is no longer any formal mechanism to do the job.

Legislative leaders now concede that this may not be an ideal way to operate a sunset law. A joint committee is now attempting to sort through the bureaucratic underbrush and come up with a workable system for evaluating which creations of state government are performing a function and which ones are merely vestigial. Within a couple of years, they hope, Maine’s oversight system may start achieving some of the goals that prompted its creation in the first place.

If so, though, it will be one of the few that does. Nearly 40 states have created sunset mechanisms of one sort or another in the past couple of decades, and the vast majority have had a hard time putting any significant boards, commissions or agencies out of operation. The ones that do get sunsetted tend to be tiny operations that don’t do much but don’t cost the taxpayers very much either.

It may well be that, after extensive study, Maine will no longer have a Seed Potato Board, a Blueberry Commission, or a Board of Hearing Aid Dealers and Fitters. But if I were running one of those institutions, I’d keep filing my annual report, just in case.

Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing.

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