Search Results

When Thomas Greitens shows his students photos of “Budget Exhibits” from the early part of the 20th Century, they are shocked. “It’s a weird idea to have a budget exhibit and have a hundred thousand people coming to it,” he says. Now largely forgotten, budget exhibits spread through the country in the first two decades of the 1900s. Then, in the 1920s, they were largely abandoned as being too political. “That’s an unknown story in public administration about how the early reformers tried to engage citizens. But that was the goal – to engage citizens so they could understand complex issues more clearly,” said Greitens, associate professor at Central Michigan University and Masters of Public Administration program director there. With his help, and the skills of our son and daughter-in-law, Ben Greene and Madeline Walter, we created the slide show that will be up on our home page over the next few weeks. It shows the material used in budget exhibits in New York, Spokane and St. Louis, which utilized charts and cartoons to educate and engage. Greitens first learned about budget exhibits when he was getting his Ph.D at Northern Illinois University. “My professor, Irene Rubin, was well known for teaching the politics of governing. She had done research on the early reform movement and had mentioned these budget exhibits in class.” But Greitens didn’t have a full sense of what these exhibitions looked like until he started collecting early photos himself. The pictures he has shared with us, provide a good reminder that “there is really nothing new under the sun.” We often talk with government managers who have introduced new ideas into their cities, counties or states, not realizing that the same ideas were introduced a decade or more before. In fact, transparency and performance measurement in government management both have a long history behind them and there are multiple lessons to be learned from their past success and failures. Charts and graphs are now widely used on the Internet to explain different aspects of government finance, but Greitens muses over whether the idea of an educationally-oriented budget exhibit might have merit today, particularly since citizens no longer have the civics training they once had. “We could use the budget exhibit to educate citizens today about the budget, about the complexities of the budget, how decisions are made and the outcome of budgeting decisions. Get them thinking about budgeting in new ways.”

You can barely find a list of “ten tips for better government,” in which a word like “partnership” isn’t used and we’ve detected a surge in the frequency of its use. Partnership is at the center of the Smarter School Spending program sponsored by The Government Finance Officers Association, in which school districts apply to be part of the “Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting.” As described by Shayne Kavanagh, senior manager for research at GFOA, the goal of the program is for local alliances to develop new collaborative decision-making processes in schools in hopes that they get a bigger bang for their limited buck, with well-researched curriculum decisions driving the budget rather than the budget driving the curriculum. Not just any school district can join. Applications must be signed by both finance and academic officials. “It’s a finance and academic partnership that gets them talking together and pulling together. The focus is on making good financial decisions and good academic strategy decisions,” said Kavanagh. The alliances are guided by a bundle of key principles including encouragement to be widely inclusive (bringing superintendents, school boards and community members into the problem-solving process) and to evaluate what they do. Local alliances are aided by a set of techniques provided by GFOA and enhanced by conversations with other district alliances. We were attracted by the lack of dogma in the approach and the focus on local decision-making based on local needs. Some of the success stories are described on the website — for example, how Traverse City Area Public Schools in rural northern, Michigan, increased student math scores. The school district saw that its math scores were below the state average, even though reading scores were above. Using the Smarter School Spending framework, they analyzed the root cause of the problem and found that teachers and administrators had a lot of problems with the curriculum and decided they needed a better one. “The standard way of doing that is to send out bids and get proposals and have vendors pitch to you,” said Kavanagh. Instead, a wide variety of players in the school district decided to run their own local pilot study, trying out three different math curriculum options in three volunteer schools. The other district schools were the control group. On cost and performance one method clearly came out on top. Teachers and the school board were convinced; the new curriculum w📷as put in place and math test scores rose. A very important additional element: Teachers and administrators saw budget officers in a new light. They were part of a team looking for a best approach and not just to dictate the dollars that could be spent. In addition to describing a number of other success stories, the Smarter School Spending website also provides details on the research-based framework and gives school districts a substantial set of GFOA resources.

While recreational marijuana has provided a windfall in new taxes for some states, it also introduces some knotty administrative issues. Since the federal government still considers marijuana a controlled substance, many businesses have a hard time utilizing traditional banking services. That mean taxes on marijuana are often delivered in cash. In this highly technological e-everything world, that can be a challenge to state revenue departments. Cash needs to be handled in a different way. It requires special equipment and additional staff to count and deal with the money. New controls and security measures are also needed when you have lots of cash on hand. Then there’s the odor. It turns out that marijuana cash, often delivered in person by retailers, smells like marijuana. Oregon is solving this problem by renovating the Department of Revenue building in Salem with a new five-station payment area, according to an article in The Portland Tribune. That’s expected to cost in the $800,000 range. A second round of bidding on Oregon’s request for proposals for a contractor, was closed yesterday. (The first round, earlier this year, didn’t get the department what it wanted.) Not all retailers pay their taxes in cash. Some have found banks that will do business with them, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the banking industry about enforcement of federal laws, particularly given the current administration’s unfriendly stance to legalized marijuana. Governing published a useful map at the end of January, showing state marijuana laws.

Twenty years have passed since Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) disappeared, replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Notwithstanding all the acronyms, this was a far more important advance than simply shifting around some letters. But what happened since then? Some answers are emerging. First a little background: The reform, established by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, shifted funding to a block grant.  States were given the ability to choose and discard different services. Cash benefits diminished and the focus on “welfare to work” greatly expanded. Time limits were put on receiving assistance and variations in the way states ran their programs expanded. This month, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin released an excellent short issue brief focused on the impact of reform. It’s based on a meeting of policy-makers, practitioners and researchers that was hosted by the Brookings Institution Center on Children and Families and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research The brief starts out with the good news, including major improvements to child health outcomes since the mid-1990s. Mortality rates, particularly for young black males, have dropped. Teen pregnancies declined as did eighth grade tobacco and alcohol use. According to the brief, “Even in a time of growing income inequality, the well-being of the young has significantly improved, especially among blacks and the poorest Americans.” But the job of figuring out results of reform are hideously complex given swings in the economy and the number of other programs that expanded, or contracted during the last twenty years. It’s likely that many improvements stem more from increased access to health care for children through Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Similarly, the brief cites the Earned Income Tax Credit as likely having a greater impact on work participation than did TANF. Other observations from the brief: TANF had success in increasing job participation for less educated women, though only by 2 to 4 percentage points. While TANF and associated work programs have lifted incomes for mothers with skills, it left behind unskilled workers. This has created a situation in which a number of families with significant employment barriers are cut off from safety net programs and live in deep poverty. According to the brief, “The personal responsibility emphasis of welfare reform was not balanced by a public responsibility to create jobs.” Non-marital births rose as a percent of the total – from 32 percent right before reform to 41 percent in 2013. “Promoting marriage and reducing non-marital births was welfare reform’s least realized goal,” the brief says. Inflation has eaten into the size of the $16.5 billion block grant, making its value about one third less than in 1996. Cash assistance has dwindled enormously from 70 percent of TANF dollars in 1997 to 23 percent in 2014. The brief provides informative end notes, with a multitude of other sources for readers.

Over the years, we’ve had many discussions about the disconnect between  research that goes on at public universities and governments’ own needs for policy research. Universities and governments have different concepts of time, are motivated by conflicting goals and speak in different languages. Result: Frustration on both sides We bring this up because we just watched a really excellent half-day forum that was focused on bringing policymakers and academics together. The February 17th session, “Bridging Research and Policy” was sponsored by the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM) and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Its three panel discussions centered on ways to get legislators to pay attention to research; on building better relations between policy makers and universities, and on evaluation and evidence-based policy making and the uses of government administrative data. More details about the forum are available in this write-up. The forum itself is available in its entirety here. (The intro and first panel discussion actually start about half an hour after the camera was turned on.) Some of the major messages that came across to us: Trust is critical, particularly where sensitive government data is involved, and relationships need to be nurtured. Both researchers and policymakers need a safe space to have discussions with each other in private, without the threat of publicity. Both would be helped if there were a systemized way for governments to know what research universities are currently engaged in. Interaction is more effective than reports. Easy-to-digest visual material is better than lengthy text. Academics could use the skills of marketers when presenting research and should consider the learning styles of individual legislators. Governments should consider research needs for a new program or policy upfront. Timing is critical for everyone. Legislators, particularly part-time legislators, have a narrow window in which they can engage on research topics. Research on program and policy direction should include more attention to implementation issues and cost.

A few years ago we gave a speech to the annual conference of the Association of Local Government Auditors about what keeps auditors awake at night. One reason, often cited: Departmental obstructionism. We were reminded of this recently when we saw the controversy emerging in Richmond over the city’s unwillingness to cooperate with the auditor’s review of tax collections. At last count, the city was owed about $53 million by taxpayers. In a nicely reported piece by Ned Oliver at The Richmond Times-Dispatch, interviews with council members showed broad support for the auditor’s examination of tax collections. But Oliver found that state rules laws limit the ability of a local auditor to access tax records unless this is requested by a city’s finance director. The Richmond finance director, and other top city officials have said that they don’t see a need for the audit. “I was embarrassed to see someone from the administration say they’re not willing to give information to our auditor. Whether it’s state law or not, we all talk about transparency. Transparency can’t be selectively entered into and out of, “ said council member Michael Jones. We hear about issues like this cropping up all the time. On March 6, the New York Comptroller’s office issued a summary of an audit report for the Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs.  “We were unable to draw conclusions about several of the most important parts of our audit because the Center did not provide us with access to most of the relevant information needed to achieve our audit objective,” the summary said. As it happens, we were on the phone last week with Drummond Kahn, the director of audit services in Portland Oregon. Do auditors often face departmental roadblocks we asked. “It happens all the time,” he said. Often, a department’s excuse is that it’s just not the right time for an audit.  “Either there’s a new manager or the manager is about to leave or it’s budget season or they’re going into budget season or budget season has just finished. Or they’re putting in a new technology system or they need to replace their technology system.” It’s no wonder auditors lose sleep.

They are the states that have the highest population of residents, aged 65 or older, as this “map of the month” from the Pennsylvania State Data Center shows. For each one of them, the population 65 and over represents more than 17 percent of the total, compared to around 10 percent for states like Alaska and Utah.  According to a recent issue brief from the center, the number of older people in Pennsylvania grew 10 percent between 2011 and 2015, while the general population rose 0.5 percent. The Data Center’s Maps of the Month can be found here.

Over more than 25 years of covering state and local government, we can’t recall ever talking to a public sector manager who loved going to meetings. Clearly, somebody out there must like them, because there are so many. We just haven’t run into the meeting-mongers in the government management world. It always seems to us like many gatherings are called without any thought about the value of the time that will be expended. Say, a manager brings seven supervisors into a conference room for a two-hour session. That’s eight people, including the manager, times two hours or a total of sixteen hours — or two full days of work for one person. That doesn’t even count the amount of time people should be taking to prepare for the gathering, and the  inevitable chit-chat dissecting the interpersonal relationships betrayed at the meeting. (“Did you see the way Connie rolled her eyes, when Ralph interrupted?”) We believe that this equation should run through the mind of anyone who is mandating exclusive use of a number of other employees. Following, based on a number of conversations we’ve had over the years, are seven ideas for making meetings more productive, and possibly cutting down on resentment at their very existence. Whoever called for the meeting should be there exactly when the meeting is supposed to start. There are few things more galling than to have a bunch of busy people sitting in a room, awaiting the appearance of someone who gives the appearance of being too busy to get to his or her own meeting on time. Somebody should be taking really good notes, and — without taking too much time — distributing them to the men and women who were in attendance. If you set a meeting for an hour, and it doesn’t need an hour, don’t wait for the Red Sea to part. Just let those people go. Meetings should end with some time to discuss “next steps,” so that attendees will feel like this session led someplace except to the graveyard of hours they’ll never see again. Make sure the people in the room all get an agenda in advance. And by in advance, we don’t mean an e-mail that pops up 10 minutes before the gathering begins. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that there’s infinite time for the meeting during the first third, moving along at a decent pace in the second third, and then rushing in the last third — which often is when the group is trying to come to some conclusions. There are lots more ideas, but here’s one that’s near to our hearts: If people are joining into the meeting by telephone, make sure they have the chance to actually participate.

Construction contracts are often selected based on the lowest bid from a responsible bidder.  That certainly seems like a sensible starting point — although it’s probably a good idea to take the quality of previous work into account. It’s not so hard to be labeled responsible and offer a low bid, but to produce a service that’s inferior to competitors. But that’s just the beginning of the story. Line items in bids themselves can sometimes be misleading — either accidentally or on purpose. If elements of an agreement are underpriced, the contractor recoups missing dollars through change orders that adjust and diminish original plans. There’s also a problem when bidders structure the payments in such a way as to make them higher than it may appear – for example, front-loading costs at the beginning of a project. This phenomenon – items priced too low or too high — is dubbed “unbalanced bidding.” It can lead to project costs that are greater than estimated and it can lead to bid awards that are ultimately unfair to competitors. Recently, the Oregon Secretary of State’s audit division released an audit examining this issue in the Department of Transportation. It looked at how bids compared to the DOT’s estimates and also analyzed changes in project cost over time. It found that 61 percent of 413 projects completed between 2011 and 2015 had “one or more unbalanced bids that were at least double their estimated costs.” In 69 percent of projects, the final contract costs exceeded the bid amounts, although the total project costs of $1.8 billion were still slightly under the original budgeted amount of $1.9 billion. (The contract cost is only one part of the total project cost, which can also include a variety of other factors such as fuel or steel prices.) The audit stated that Oregon “could potentially realize significant savings by better tracking and scrutinizing bids” and thereby avoiding project cost increases. It also emphasized that unbalanced bidding can “undermine fair competition.” As Secretary of State Dennis Richardson said in a press release: “Unbalanced bids allow some contractors to game the system, and ODOT is not providing proper accountability.” The accuracy of the audit’s calculations were questioned by ODOT, which pointed out to the Oregonian that final contract costs include many other factors that don’t appear in project bids. The DOT did agree, however, to step-up its monitoring of bids.

Last month, we gave ourselves a new tool to keep an ongoing watch on what executive orders governors are signing. It’s an interactive map that we created (with the help of our son, Ben Greene), with links to executive orders for all the states. (Well, almost. We couldn’t find good links for Kentucky or West Virginia.) We’ve shared the map with our readers and you can find it in our Resources section. And now, we’re planning to add a regular feature to the B&G Report on our website to help readers keep track of some of the more interesting and important of these orders — many of which often go ignored by the public and the press. Right now, even as we’re watching an alarming blizzard outside our window in Manhattan, weather emergencies are getting lots of ink out of governors’ pens. At least two governors – in New Jersey and Virginia – signed executive orders yesterday declaring states of emergency due to the storm which was projected to drop loads of snow through the Northeast, stretching south to Virginia. We expect more executive orders to come from neighboring governors through the day. Weather emergencies are the most common reason for governors to sign executive orders. In addition to the ones stemming from today’s storm, in February and early March, governors  signed orders relating to flooding (North Dakota), drought and/or wildfires (Oklahoma and Kansas) and snow or other severe weather (California, Missouri, Montana). But proclamations related to weather are just the beginning. Executive orders are commonly used to address policy issues and improve management. We took a look at all of the links in the last few days and came up with the following observations. A number of executive orders signed in the last month and a half established new task forces or study commissions. These included the “Grocery Tax Task Force” in Alabama, established on February 22 by Gov. Robert Bentley; the “Government Efficiency & Accountability Review (GEAR) Board, established by Delaware Gov. John C. Carney Jr., on February 16th; the Black Advisory Commission, set up on February 23rd by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and the Two-Generation Family Economic Security Commission and Pilot Program, created by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on March 9th. A few dealt with new government positions or other management initiatives. One example is Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s March 8 executive order, which established a Homeland Security Advisor and created the Michigan Homeland Protection Board. That same day, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed an executive order “promoting open and transparent government through continued implementation of best practices and performance dashboards.” Two executive orders appeared to directly address White House actions. As we mentioned in our February 13th post, Gov. Kate Brown in Oregon, signed an order on February 2, “Renewing Oregon’s commitment to protecting its immigrant, refugee and religious minority residents.” On February 23, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy signed an order affirming “the protection of students from discrimination based on sex, including gender identity or expression.” Several Governors either reiterated their concern or joined the growing list of chief executives who have used executive orders to help combat substance abuse. On February 16, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker used an administrative order to “outline a plan to address the heroin and opioid epidemics and overdose related deaths.” On March 1, Gov. Hogan followed up on his January creation of an interagency heroin and opioid coordinating council by declared a “State of Emergency within the entire state of Maryland, “regarding the heroin, opioid and Fentanyl overdose Crises.” A few other February and early March executive orders we found interesting: An executive order signed by new Gov. Eric Holcomb in Indiana declaring and then extending a “disaster emergency” in East Chicago due to “certain lead conditions in a portion of East Chicago” and concerns about slightly elevated blood lead levels found in 18 children under the age of 8. A series of executive orders in New York assigning special prosecutors to investigate and prosecute the deaths of civilians by law enforcement officers An executive order appointing several retired justices to lead an “Independent Review of Security Issues” at the Delaware Correctional Facility, signed by Delaware Gov. Carney.

In the early years of our marriage, a favorite activity was clipping magazines to find interesting story ideas. We carried our own clip kits, including staplers, X-Acto knives, pens, paperclips, etc. At one point, we fell so far behind that we invited our friends to a help-us-clip party – our version of an old-fashioned quilting bee. Finding fascinating articles, studies, reports, commentary, surveys, etc., has gotten a lot easier since then, thanks to the Internet. But we scour dozens of state, local, university, organization and foundation websites each week to find new ideas and insights to write about. We treasure other organizations’ compilations of studies, particularly when the organizations are unbiased and selective. It helps us make sure that each week we see some of the best of the hundreds of reports that are published about state and local government problems, policies and programs. Today, we wanted to bring to your attention two of our favorite weekly study summaries. One comes from Florida and the other from California. Although researchers for each will sometimes focus on studies relevant to their own state, the selections gathered each week are often of general interest and just as relevant to other states, and often local governments, as well. Our two recommendations: PolicyNotes from the Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability in Florida. This comes out on Fridays. Typically, there will be summaries of a few studies each in criminal justice, education, government operations and health and human services. As a sample, the March 10 version included OPPAGA’s own report about the declining number of young people in Florida currently being tried in adult courts; a report from the Midwest Regional Education Laboratory about the difference in educational expectations for rural and non-rural 10th grade students, and an Urban Institute study about past-due medical debt. There is often a lag in getting the newest version into the archive. For timely access to PolicyNotes, you also can subscribe. Studies in the News is published by the California State Library. It comes out on Wednesdays. Topics covered each week vary slightly, but generally include education, “culture and democracy,” the economy, health, general government, transportation and several other areas of state policy. The most recent version, dated March 8, includes study summaries about the effect of job change on the timing of retirement for older adults, from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College; a look at regional differences in child poverty in California from the Public Policy Institute of California, and the impact of student debt on young people returning to live with their parents from the Sociology of Education Journal. Note: We will periodically provide reading recommendations in this space, including books, websites, blogs, reports, and other generally useful compilations of materials. We also welcome suggestions from readers (particularly those that aren’t self-promotional).

“When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.” — Lyndon B. Johnson