Efficiency study a waste?
No doubt state government can be more efficient. But there are reasons to be skeptical that the state’s new auditors will find enough politically viable reforms to justify a contract worth up to $3 million.
Even state budget director Shawn Sullivan says “the low-hanging fruit is gone.” And it was the inability to find more budget cuts to help offset an $800 million shortfall that drove the 2015 Legislature to a record 114 days and $384 million tax increase.
Giving up, lawmakers left it to the governor to make $50 million more in unspecified cuts. In late July the administration opted not to satisfy the mandate with budget reductions alone, also using fund transfers and some federal aid through the Affordable Care Act to shore up state reserves by $62.6 million.
Authorization of the Kansas State Government Efficiency Study also was a punt, tucked into the massive session-ending budget package as a promise legislative conservatives made to themselves to find further savings.
As House Appropriations Committee Chairman Ron Ryckman Jr., R-Olathe, said in June: “The budget process doesn’t equip legislators with the time or the resources to delve into the operations of state agencies to look for ways to save money from both detailed and broad spectrum perspectives.”
A request for proposals went out in early August, mentioning the desire to “help define an innovative, customized blueprint to reinvent government and drive transformational cost efficiencies.”
Last week the Legislative Budget Committee went behind closed doors as part of the presentations of four proposals – troubling secrecy, as whatever the bidders had to say was the business of the Kansas taxpayers who’d be paying the $3 million bill.
On Friday the panel voted to negotiate a contract with global firm Alvarez and Marsal Public Sector Services, which did a similar study of Louisiana last year and also has worked with North Carolina, Puerto Rico and the New Orleans schools system.
Between now and when its preliminary report is due Jan. 1, the consultant is expected to analyze five years of state budgets, compare state spending to peer states and other benchmarks, and recommend efficiencies and savings. A final report is due April 1.
Notably, lawmakers took a number of spending areas off the table, including themselves and legislative agencies. (So the study cannot call for fewer than the current 165 lawmakers, say, or for a unicameral Legislature.) The contract also excludes the judicial branch, and city and county governments – the latter a frequent and easy target, as Kansas has more units of government (counting townships and cemetery districts) than all but four states.
The exclusions will put special focus on K-12 school funding and social services including Medicaid. Those are budget areas already under pressure since the recession and 2012 income-tax cuts.
For the study to have merit, the ideas will need to be matched by the political will to implement them. If not, this latest effort to save Kansas taxpayers’ money will have wasted $3 million more of it.
For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman
This story was originally published September 22, 2015 at 7:06 PM with the headline "Efficiency study a waste?."