« Law - Gay-marriage defeat puts legal arrangements in question | Main | Indiana Courts - More on Video store hearing before Judge Barker »

Friday, November 12, 2004

Indiana Law - Upcoming Indiana government efficiency report awaited

I've seen several stories now on reports of various subcommittees of the Indiana Government Efficiency Commission and can't wait to see the actual documents. When available, I will of course post links here. An AP story today by Mike Smith reports on the subcommittee on general government. Some quotes:

State government has evolved into a "bewildering array" of agencies and programs and is an "unmanageable organization" that needs radical changes if significant savings are to be found, a commission has concluded.

The Government Efficiency Commission's subcommittee on general government also said that state employees, many of them dedicated public servants, were immersed in a culture resistant to change that "can be traced to fear and ignorance of the unknown."

"Changing this culture is a key necessity to making state government more efficient, less costly and affordable within the resources available to our state for the foreseeable future," Steve Baranyk, a business management consultant and chairman of the subcommittee, wrote in a report.

The panel said the legislative and executive branches should immediately restructure government to make it effective and manageable. * * * The commission did not plan to publicize its findings about general government until Monday, but The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report beforehand. * * *

"The executive branch of our state government currently consists of a bewildering array of agencies, departments, commissions, programs and other functions, all of which constitute, in the mind of this writer, an unmanageable organization," Baranyk said in the report.

The report said the prevailing attitude was that government was not a business and should not be run like one. Because of that, "no serious effort is made to measure the many functions of state government and suggestions to do so are met with a combination of skepticism and disinterest."

The group said it may be possible to shave "some expenses here and there" within the current structure and environment. But it would take radical changes if the goal is to significantly reduce the state's $830 million budget deficit, it said.

"These savings are not available by `counting paperclips, pencils and pads of paper,' but rather by cutting what many currently ... consider to be `bone and muscle' items in the budget," the report said.

Smith also has a brief story today on Indiana Government Efficiency Commission's subcommittee on higher education. There are to be four reports in total: Kindergarten through 12th grade, higher education, general government and Medicaid and human services.

[More] Here is the story from today's Indianapolis Star, headlined "Searching for savings, panel finds a quagmire: State spending poorly tracked, hard to fix."A panel that's been working for months on ways to streamline Indiana state government says an impenetrable bureaucracy makes recommendations almost impossible, according to a report scheduled for release next week.

Even the most basic financial information on state spending is too sketchy to allow many conclusions, according to the Indiana Government Efficiency Commission. * * *

Indiana has long operated state government on the cheap when it comes to tracking state spending. Detailed and timely information about who pays state taxes is notoriously hard to come by. Despite how much rides on changes in property tax policy, just a handful of state employees are able to work with property tax data.

Baranyk, a private management consultant from Carmel, said the problems go beyond a single party or a single administration. "It's happened over many, many decades." His subcommittee did find some disturbing trends. Spending on prison inmates rose by 8.2 percent a year while the prison population grew by 4.5 percent. As a result, the panel will recommend accelerating the release of inmates who no longer pose a threat to the public.

The panel also questions whether spending $27 million last year on disability and workers' compensation payments to state employees might be excessive. But the group found that without a radical overhaul, achieving major cost savings in state government isn't possible.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 12, 2004 08:22 AM
Posted to Indiana Law