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We sometimes see videos about state and local government topics that we think are particularly well done. This one comes from The Oregonian and describes some of the problems with Oregon’s various efforts at property tax reform. Reform efforts are often designed to provide property tax relief, but sometimes they have unexpected effects. Any time you mess with a tax system there are always winners and losers. The three-minute video is informative and carries lessons for tax reformers in other states.

We are always on the lookout for policies or practices that exist in only a handful of governments, but appear to work very well. A great example is the Iowa Ombudsman office. It’s only one of five state-administered organizations in the U.S that have broad jurisdiction to handle a wide variety of citizen problems. The other state ombudsman offices with broad jurisdiction are in Alaska, Nebraska, Arizona and Hawaii. As we wrote in Governing in August 2016, many other governments have ombudsman offices in select agencies, often related to children services, special education, corrections or nursing home care.  These specialized offices are proliferating. But broad jurisdiction has significant plusses. “The scope of our purview is the advantage,” says new Iowa ombudsman Kristie Hirschman. “The advantage of a classical, independent broadly-based ombudsman office is we can handle all types of complaints, whether it’s somebody calling because the city won’t pave their street, the county won’t give a building permit or the state is taking away their children.” Her office was established in 1970 and has substantial investigatory powers, including the ability to put people under oath, issue subpoenas and look at meeting records from closed sessions. By statute, one of her assistant ombudsmen are devoted full-time to corrections. Her office’s 2016 annual report came out this month and shows the scope of its work and also how very frustrating it can be, in some cases, for citizens or businesses to deal with government. In 2016, there was a substantial increase in both corrections and Medicaid managed care complaints. Although the total number of 2016 cases opened was up only about 3 percent, the number of corrections cases went up 22 percent and Department of Human Services Medical and managed care cases rose 63 percent. The rise in the latter stemmed from a shift to a new health delivery and payment system – Iowa moved to managed care Medicaid delivery in April of 2016. Only about 13 percent of complaints brought to Hirschman’s office are fully or partially substantiated. Those that are, show the intense frustration that can sometimes occur when dealing with insensitive, hurried or unsupportive government officials. Take the man who received a $215 bill from his city due to an overgrown lawn. There was no prior warning, no date as to when the violation had occurred, very little supporting detail and no information on how to appeal the bill, which he believed was levied incorrectly. When he called the city to complain, he was given the name of a person to call to discuss the matter. That was a dead-end, as that individual turned out to be on an extended leave. Eventually, he called the ombudsman for help. One enormous plus of the Iowa office is that the phone line is not heavily automated. Callers reach a person they can talk with. Complaints do not need to be submitted in writing, either. When the ombudsman’s office started investigating, the city could not explain how it arrived at a $215 charge, which was presumably levied for mowing the allegedly overgrown lawn. Photos by the work crew showed that only a small patch was overgrown, not the whole lawn. A city attorney agreed to refund all but $50. In addition, the inquiry led to changes in city practices. New rules added a requirement that prior warnings be given, that specific fees be explained, that residents be notified of their appeal rights and that a contact is provided for a resident who wants to follow up. Although Hirschman was just appointed ombudsman in January, she has worked for the office for 22 years. She said a key way for agencies to avoid complaints was to provide clearer explanations of their actions and rules. “We’re all guilty to a degree,” she says. “We are so familiar with a subject that we forget other people aren’t familiar with it. Communication and patience is critical in regards to agency interactions with citizens they serve.”

The basic principles of Lean management, like many other process improvement efforts, involve the identification of problems and a team approach to finding solutions through analysis of where errors occur and where time is wasted. No question this approach has a great many advocates and a number of success stories. But it’s not all beer and skittles. Last month, CPS HR Consulting and the American Society for Quality’s government division put out a new white paper that looks both at the success of Lean practices and why they tend to be relatively short-lived within the agencies that use them.  The study is based on responses from a  small group of respondents from known Lean or quality improvement offices in government agencies. One of the biggest issues is employee fear.  Twenty-seven percent of respondents said that there was a concern among employees that eliminating steps and wasted time would also potentially eliminate jobs and result in budget cuts. The white paper recommends that process and quality improvement efforts deal with these fears upfront with assurances to employees that their good work won’t result in the loss of their jobs. Another important recommendation is for agencies to retain savings achieved through improvements and not see their budgets cut due to their success. The white paper also shows the enormous importance – as always – in leadership support.  The lack of buy-in from upper management not only stands in the way of good ideas being implemented, but of successful Lean and quality improvement techniques spreading through the agency. The study shows that even when teams have demonstrated success, the techniques used are slow to spread. “There is no evidence that Lean Process Improvement spreads throughout an agency based on practiced success in some of its programs and offices,” the white paper says. Leadership change also means these efforts have a relatively short life-cycle. “Most do not survive more than three to five years due to a lack of structured support.” The following chart shows some of the responses to questions asked in the survey, which was conducted in the summer of 2016 and was released in mid-March.

This week, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards became the last of the 50 governors to deliver a state of the state address for 2017. Over the last three and a half months, we’ve read though 49 state of the state transcripts, or an equivalent speech, which is occasionally labeled differently.  (We couldn’t find a transcript for Kentucky.) We do this every year because it gives us a good sense of  governors’ goals, their major challenges and how they view the accomplishments of the last year. This year, we created word clouds for each speech, with the assistance of Tagcrowd.com. For the uninitiated, word clouds pull out the most often used words in selected text, providing a visual guide to the frequency of use by the size of the word. Our word clouds picked up the 50 frequently repeated words in each speech. We’ve provided our readers with an interactive map in our Resources section that will enable them to find the word cloud for each governor’s speech. We strongly suggest that you take a look. These infographics aren’t just informative, they’re fun. The direct link is here. It is interesting to see which words show up, as well as which words don’t. Our mostly-just-for-fun analysis of our 49 word clouds, show the words “work” and “jobs” appear as the biggest and boldest words most frequently (aside, of course, from the actual names of the states). Education, schools, teachers and students are up there as well. Children or kids were among the most dominant words in Alabama, Texas and New Mexico. Maine is the only state in which “elderly” appeared as a dominant word, though “seniors” was also a dominant word in Pennsylvania. Climate is among the most dominant words in the January speech of Gov. Jerry Brown. For other governors, it didn’t even appear in the top 50 list. Immigration also appears as one of the top words in California and does not appear in the top 50 for any other state. While multiple governors talked about substance abuse, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s speech stood out with the following words showing up in his word cloud:  addiction, drug, families and treatment. Tax was a prominent word in many speeches, including the one delivered this week by Gov. Edwards, who used his state of the state to call out the pressing need for reform (another repeated word). Other words in the Louisiana word cloud, which is pictured on this page, connect with the difficulties of the state’s current fiscal situation including “cuts”, “reduce”, “challenges” and “budget”. Reading through the transcript of Gov. Edwards speech, we saw another repeated theme of the year – the exhortation to work together. “I refuse to allow governing the state of Louisiana to look anything like what’s going on in Washington,” Gov. Edwards said on Monday. The word “together” was among the top words used in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington. It appeared among the top 50 words in half the states, including Louisiana. Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s speech last week was the state of the state that was most focused on the future and the many transitions that are taking place in today’s world. Two of the most dominant words in his speech were “Think” and “Change.” “Health” was the single most dominant word in only one speech this year. Interestingly, this was in the state of the state given by Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, who alarmed his audience by collapsing toward the end of his January talk. (His chief of staff quickly released word that he was okay, though Gov. Dayton does have health problems, including a diagnosis of prostate cancer, which was revealed the following day.) Medicaid was one of the top 50 words in only Louisiana and Georgia. A couple of caveats, when you look at individual state of the state word clouds. There are a series of words that are frequently used that don’t reveal much. Common words like “people” and “year” often show up in big bold type.  The frequency of the word “budget” is somewhat affected by the fact that in some states, the state of the state address doubles as the governor’s budget address. But it also shows up predictably in states with current fiscal stress including Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Kansas, Nebraska and a handful of states with diminished oil and gas revenues such as Alaska, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Wyoming. One more word of caution. We know it’s somewhat risky relying on transcripts as they are most frequently prepared remarks and may be changed by governors who veer away from what’s written when they actually deliver their speech.

There are a number of typical ways we get our information about local governments. We go to city council websites or talk to government oversight and watchdog groups. We constantly monitor the output of local government auditors and look at the websites of cities and counties themselves. But there is one source we use for California local governments that exists pretty much no place else. The Civil Grand Jury. In each one of California’s 58 counties, a grand jury is assembled out of citizen volunteers each and every year. While grand juries in other states are focused on criminal issues, California’s civil grand juries are appointed for a full year and spend that time investigating and reporting on different aspects of local government management. The best way to get a quick look at the output and results of California’s Civil Grand Jury investigations is to go to the California Grand Jurors’ Association, which has a frequently updated blog that follows the work of the grand juries, the reports they publish, juror experiences, and the impact of their investigations. Jury selection has just started for the 2017-2018 year, for the one-year term that begins about July 1. This system has been in place at least since California became a state and is part of the 1850 California Constitution. Jurors do not have any special government experience. They apply to the county court, which generally makes an initial selection, usually of 30, and then, if there are more applicants than there are jury spots, 19 are selected by lottery. (For smaller counties, the number is reduced to 11.) California also utilizes grand juries for criminal indictments, but in almost all counties that’s a separate body. Each year, about 1,100 California civil grand jurors produce about 900 reports that examine a very wide array of topics, including jail conditions, school district finances, county environmental protection, treatment of the mentally ill, issues of local government corruption and much more. At the beginning of their terms, they establish their own working rules and choose the topics to be investigated. Many stay involved with the jurors’ association for years. We are particularly intrigued with this system for the enormous satisfaction it appears to give jurors, who really learn about local government and provide input in a way that just doesn’t exist elsewhere. “The learning curve was steep but also exhilarating,” wrote one juror from San Joaquin County in a recent blog post. “It’s fun to know stuff, to learn things. I can’t think of a day I attended to jury business that I didn’t learn something interesting.” We made the mistake of referring to California’s system as novel, when we spoke with Jerry Lewi, who is currently the vice chair of public relations and has worn a wide variety of hats in the California Grand Jurors’ Association since he did his first stint of jury service in the late 1990s. “The use of novel is an odd word,” he said. As it turns out, utilizing a grand jury for citizen oversight of local government began about eight hundred years ago in England. It was common in America’s colonial days and spread westward as the country expanded. But gradually, in most states, the citizen oversight function evaporated. While a few other states may have remnants of a grand jury local oversight function, California is the only state with a full-fledged system. Maybe other states should consider this idea, too.

We often spot recurring themes in audits – questionable data quality, inadequate prioritization, limited capacity and performance that falls short of standards. All of these issues were present in an audit we just read from the Office of the City Auditor in Austin. The topic was City Utility Street Cut Repairs. The problem: A repair backlog of 3,864 utility cut patches. These are patches put in place by Austin Water, when it cuts into the street to fix leaky water pipes, for example. An average of 185 utility cuts are made each month. Thirty days after the temporary patch is in place, the Austin Public Works Department takes over responsibility for fixing the street in a more permanent way. City code says temporary patches shouldn’t be in place for more than 90 days. The audit team looked at ten randomly selected patches and found not one had met that standard. The audit shows how problems can be built into the staffing structure of city departments. It should not really be a surprise to anyone that there’s a backlog of repairs. While Austin water makes 185 cuts each month, Public Works, with a repair staff about half the size, fixes an average of about 89 per month. A similar situation was found by the Austin audit office in 1998. Resource shortages for Public Works are compounded by vacancies in the department. It did start to contract out some of its work in 2016, but it doesn’t have good enough data to evaluate whether more contracting would be cost effective or whether the solution instead would be more staff. Another problem: the audit found that prioritization was weak. Although some patches are more treacherous than others, there is no process to move more dangerous patches to the front of the cue. As the audit points out, some of the temporary patches “are unreliable and possibly unsafe due to issues with age or height.” Data, in general, was cited a number of times as a problem in this audit. Information on cost effectiveness is missing and there are data inconsistencies in the records held by Public Works and Austin Water. These problems make it difficult to get a consistent and accurate read on the true size of the backlog. “As a result, Public Works management cannot be sure the information they report or use for planning or resource allocation is accurate,” the audit says.

In our March 23rd Governing column, we wrote about Generation Z. That’s the age group that’s just now entering the workforce and making the Millennials feel old. We mentioned a few different characteristics common to this group of new public sector employees. Having lived through the recession at a formative age, for example, they are more inclined to want security and are less impatient about getting quick promotions. In a yet-to-be published survey by the Center for Generational Kinetics, they show a stronger desire to help their communities than the Millennials, Gen X or us Baby Boomers. Of course, it’s still very early to tell too much about this new generation, of which the oldest were born in the mid-to-late 1990s and the youngest are about seven years old. Here are some additional tips for managers, public or private, who are just beginning to welcome the oldest segment of this generation into the workplace. Training may need to focus more on basics – phone and face-to-face office etiquette, dress expectations and so on, as they may not have a lot of work experience. Summer jobs have been hard to come by in the 21st Century and teenagers have so many extracurricular activities that the percentage holding an afterschool job has been quite low. As we mentioned in our Governing article, extra training may be needed for dealing with face-to-face encounters. The generations have gotten steadily weaker at this, according to a survey by generational consulting firm BridgeWorks, which found that 74 percent of Gen Z (compared to 50 percent of the oldest set of Millennials) struggle with in-person communications. Visual training beats text for a generation that reads less. Accommodate the idea that work and fun can be mixed. Gen Zs have spent their lives in a world in which communication is constant and access to work and play occurs throughout the day rather than being separated into distinct segments. Bolster your employee assistance services. We spoke with Cris Zamora, the coordinator of the employee assistance program in Milwaukee. He has found that the city’s youngest workers come in for financial advice and emotional counseling with disproportionate frequency. Workers under age 25 were 3 percent of the city workforce in 2016, but 12 percent of the individuals who were served by employee assistance. In contrast, 26 to 35 year olds made up 26 percent of the Milwaukee workforce and accounted for 4 percent of the employee assistance cases.

We launched our website in January and are enjoying writing about a wide variety of government topics. But we don’t have a search mechanism (yet) and we realize that when one of our posts drops off the first page of this blog, it pretty much disappears from view. You have to be a pretty intrepid reader to scan back to see what we wrote last week or the week before. But many of the topics we cover remain timely. In addition, we are very happy with the number of new readers we’re getting every day and are eager to share past posts, as well as new ones. So, when every quarter ends, our plan is to put together a subject index to the blog posts from that period. We’ve put the First Quarter Subject Guide in the Resources section of our website. We’ve included links to blog posts from January 4th to March 31st. You’ll see we’ve covered a wide variety of topics in these three months (water leaks, unengaged state employees, misleading road signs, annoying meetings,  smelly tax collections for recreational marijuana, the big lies of government, etc.). Take a look and see what you may have missed. And while you’re visiting our website, check out our home page for this month’s multimedia feature on early 20th Century budget transparency, our “Hot off the Presses” section for links to what we’ve written elsewhere, and our Guest Column, where we feature a new — and very feisty — column by Minnesota State Auditor Rebecca Otto.

There are lots of ways in which we differ from typical journalists. We research and write for a variety of non-journalistic organizations, whether they are governments, membership organizations or think tanks. We give speeches and when government officials call asking for counsel on a variety of topics, we don’t hesitate to help. The other difference between us and a lot of reporters who are covering government is that we’ve been doing it for a very long time and have some personal historical perspective. Recently we wrote a blog post for The Fels Institute of Government, where we’re senior fellows, about the troubled partnership between government and the press. That piece was mostly geared to people in government or those who want to be. Here, then, is the other side of the coin – what we’ve learned that we’d like to share with people in the press who are covering state and local government. Their numbers are diminishing, sadly, and so we think it’s important that the remaining cadre of statehouse and city hall reporters are as close to exemplar as possible. Some thoughts: Don’t expect rapid change when new policies or practices are introduced. Articles that take governments to task for the absence of results shortly after a new policy is put into place can miss the fact that it takes time to implement almost any new policy — and if the results aren’t immediate, it doesn’t mean that it’s a failure.  By the way, this was a comment we made to Kim Geiger, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, when she interviewed us several weeks ago about the political realities encountered by Gov. Bruce Rauner’s “superstar team.” Social policy issues are complex and despite the publicly absolutist stance taken in political discussions, government practices and policies are rarely all bad or all good. They usually have some elements that are working well and others that cause problems. A flaw, or even a bunch of flaws, in a new policy may not signal the need for the policy to be abandoned. It’s kind of like the proverbial dike with a hole. The solution isn’t  to tear down the dike, but to stick a finger in the opening. Government officials who are trained to deal with the press (actually just about anyone who is trained to deal with the press) have learned to skirt questions asked so they can answer entirely different questions of their choosing. At various times we’ve had media training, and this is exactly what we’ve been told: “Don’t worry about the questions you’re asked. Just answer the question you wanted to be asked.” We try hard not to let government officials get away with this frustrating  bait and switch. Tamp down on cynicism. All journalists covering government have been lied to at various points in their careers, but in our experience — and we’ve had thousands of interviews covering every state and large city and county in the country — we’ve  found that most government employees are diligent, hardworking and inclined to be as candid as they’re permitted to be. Just because a policy or new program is passed by the legislature and is signed by a governor doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. If a bill isn’t funded, the fact that it passed may only be symbolic. We wish more journalists would follow up on important new policies to see what’s actually happened after some legislator ballyhoos this grand accomplishment. Most ideas in government have been tried before. Just check out our new slide show on transparency on the home page of this website and you’ll see all the new ideas about budget transparency that were on exhibit in 1908. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with trying them again. “Whatever government tried before in performance management, can be tried again, with the new technologies available,” John Kamensky, Senior Fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government told us some years ago (John is also an advisor to Barrett and Greene, Inc.)

Since we constantly need to pay attention to deadlines ourselves, we’ve always been startled when governments appear to be oblivious to them. The deadline dilemma comes to light, most often, with delayed financial reports. We know it’s difficult to get them done on time, especially with old and clunky (or new and confusing) technology systems. We also know finance officers — particularly in smaller entities —  struggle to implement changing standards from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. But, still . . . Our most recent example comes from Missouri. Last week, auditor Nicole Galloway released a list of cities, villages and other political subdivisions, noting their performance in getting their annual financial reports in on time. Missouri statutes require that they be submitted to the auditor’s office within six months of the end of the entity’s fiscal year. Galloway’s list pointed out that for the 3,259 local Missouri entities with fiscal years that ended on June 30th, only about 60 percent filed in a timely way. About ten percent filed after the deadline and another 30 percent still had not handed in their required report, as of the end of February. “We continue to see poor compliance with the financial reporting law, which highlights the need for stronger measures to enforce compliance,” the auditor said last week. Similarly, in January, the New York State Authorities Budget Office produced a list of 124 authorities that had failed to report annual or audit reports on time. A couple of years ago, we wrote a Governing column called, Financial Reports: Better Late than Never? The question mark at the end of that headline was important. There’s a huge amount of expert commentary on the importance of getting reports out in a timely way. At some point, a late report becomes interesting as a historical document, but loses the potential to inform current decisions.

There’s a lot that the governors’ state of the state addresses have in common. They generally start with thanks to parents, spouses, children and fellow leaders; contain quotes from former governors and Presidents (Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan are the favorites); honor notable citizens, share anecdotes, bemoan hard choices and boast about economic development success. We’ve been reading all of the governors’ speeches. Transcripts are generally made available through Office of the Governor websites. (Links to the speeches are available from a number of sources. We use the resource list compiled by the National Association of State Budget Officers.] One governor’s state of the state address stood out to us this year and not because of what he said. In Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s state of the state transcript, the facts used in the speech are linked to source material. We know that other governors may have footnoted versions of their speeches behind the scenes, but we have not seen one that is so easily available and so painstakingly referenced. We think this is a grand idea. With verifiable and questionable statistics flowing so freely through the Internet, it is good to know where facts come from. You can still question the sources, but at the least, you know what the sources are. We have long been a big fan of factcheck.org, which dissects political rhetoric on a daily basis, quashes wild Internet rumors, and helps citizens separate facts from alternative facts. So, we turned to Eugene Kiely, the organization’s director, to see what he thought of Gov. Walker’s copiously-linked speech transcript. “It’s a great idea,” he told us. “It makes it a lot easier for the public and for fact checkers to check sources and to see what they’re saying is accurate. So, kudos.” Kiely also provided a caveat. You still have to look deeply at what’s being said and what’s being left out. In 2015, his organization, which normally does not fact check state of the state addresses, did examine those that were made by presidential candidates. Gov. Walker was in the presidential contender category and his 2015 state of the state was critiqued by factcheck.org, which questioned his statements that ACT scores were up and that they were the second best in the country. Fact checking showed that ACT scores not up, but were actually quite stable. They were the virtually the same as when Gov. Walker first took office in 2011. They were second best, but Factcheck.org noted that the piece of information that was left out was that Wisconsin was second out of  the 30 states that use ACTs, not 50. This year, anyone listening to the Wisconsin speech would also have heard about the state’s record on the ACT. “We just started including everyone in the ACT tests and Wisconsin is one of the best states in the country in that category,” Walker said. This is a true statement. But for those reading the transcript and following the links, the fact is also put in context, with information taken from an August 2016 ACT publication. “Among the 18 states that administered the ACT to all students in 2015, this Wisconsin graduating class cohort ranks 4th in average ACT Composite score.”

We’ve talked with quite a few procurement officials over the last few years and we know how much time is spent negotiating prices in government-wide contracts. They are established through a competitive bidding process, in which winning vendors are selected to supply a city, county or state with the goods it needs, like reams of paper, chairs, lamps, waste baskets, cars or car parts, and so on. But even if a contract has been negotiated sensibly, actually implementing it can be tricky. A March 2017 audit in Atlanta spells out the problems that occur when agency documentation of purchases is poor, contract price lists aren’t updated regularly, and invoices reveal big discrepancies between contract prices and what agencies actually paid for goods they purchased. We’re not talking about small potatoes. Atlanta spent $43.8 million on its annual commodity contracts in 2016. The audit looked at the city’s 12 largest vendors for these purchases and found that 80 percent of the invoices the audit team sampled showed discrepancies with the contract list price or involved a contract price list that had expired. One of the problems cited in the audit is poor documentation by agencies. This not only compromises the city’s ability to know that it is getting the best prices, but also impedes its ability to analyze purchases so that it can potentially achieve higher discounts and utilize rebates from vendors. The audit suggests that the city also could achieve potential savings by joining with other governments in cooperative purchasing agreements. Multi-government cooperative contracts increase negotiating power, enabling all the participating governments to get better prices. About 15 months ago, the Atlanta City Council voted to establish a more centralized procurement system. This reorganization, which is still ongoing, involves moving some agency personnel to the Department of Procurement, and should help fix some of the problems cited in the audit. A technology upgrade is also expected to help as will closer monitoring of invoices and clearer rules both for conducting purchases and documenting them. The Department of Procurement has agreed to all the recommendations made in the audit. We suspect the recommendations would help many other governments, as well. As the audit reports, “Enforcing contract terms and analyzing spending to leverage buying power can achieve significant savings.”