Democratic lawmakers at the statehouse are using the passage of Referendum C as a launching pad to change the way the state writes its budget.
Rather than focus on just next year, lawmakers are asking each state agency to submit a five- year plan that not only forecasts the department’s financial needs but also measures how well state officials are serving the public.
The process represents a major shift in policymaking that has puzzled agency administrators more accustomed to protecting their turf with ever-increasing spending plans. Many have complained that it’s nearly impossible to look five years into the future.
“We’re dealing with a changing sea here,” said Rick Grice, executive director of the state Department of Labor and Employment, explaining the difficulty of making such forecasts.
Grice said that a fluctuating economy, changing standards from the federal government and new rules adopted by the state legislature combine to make it difficult to predict the future needs of the department.
But Rep. Bernie Buescher, D-Grand Junction, has pounded the theme at budget committee meetings with department heads in recent weeks.
“How do you determine internally how the department is doing a good job?” Buescher said. “How do we measure that we’re doing the people’s business well?”
For Buescher, it boils down to a single word: metrics.
Buescher has repeated the word like a mantra at the meetings that began in late November. He wants departments to offer ways to measure their efforts to assist citizens.
Each department official appearing before the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee gets a quiz. How long are citizens waiting on the phone when they call about unemployment benefits? How long does it take a case to wind through the courts? How does the state treasurer know if the state is getting a reasonable return on its investments?
House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, D-Denver, quips that Buescher is “an egghead” who takes a professor’s approach to the issue. Romanoff, by the way, wholeheartedly supports Buescher’s approach. That’s because there’s a serious political strategy behind the demand for “metrics.”
Democrats are aiming at critics of Referendum C who say government wastes money, so why should taxpayers trust leaders with more money?
Buescher’s goal is to show that officials are using the extra taxpayer money to improve state services.
“I think C buys us some time, but not much,” said Romanoff, who previously sponsored a bill calling for two-year budgets. That measure was defeated when Republicans controlled the legislature.
The Joint Budget Committee begins building the state budget each year in November by collecting spending plans from each department, analyzing those requests and grilling officials about their priorities.
The process can be numbing as lawmakers sift through the details. They challenge requests for a few thousand dollars to lease vehicles and chew on complicated formulas that dictate multimillion-dollar budgets for schools and health care.
The budget requests are loaded with numbers, but not enough of the kind that Buescher wants to see. In asking for money for next year, department heads explain “rising caseloads” or “declining staffing levels,” but they rarely talk about how they evaluate their department’s efforts to improve services. Buescher said that’s because lawmakers haven’t linked state funding to performance factors.
“If we want to take a look at efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, we need to make structural changes to how we set the budget,” Buescher said. “There’s an old saying: ‘Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it produces.”‘
With his requests, Buescher, a former president of an air- services company, is more of a business manager than a professor. He doesn’t simply want to study data. He wants to measure performance and reward or penalize officials according to those goals.
Statehouse Democrats are looking at Washington state and Iowa to guide them.
In Washington, former Gov. Gary Locke, a Democrat, established priorities to change the budgeting system to focus on outcomes rather than incremental increases from last year’s spending.
In Iowa, the state has established “charters” with some state departments. If department heads agree to use measurable goals, they gain freedom from some bureaucratic controls such as employee caps or across-the-board budget cuts. Using the system, the state estimates the charter agencies saved $22.5 million in 2004.
Some departments of Colorado government, such as the judicial branch, have adapted to new demands; others have struggled.
For example, the judicial branch set five-year targets in many areas of its budget plan.
The branch wants to get 99 percent of criminal cases resolved in one year, up from 94 percent.
Ninety percent of civil cases would be resolved in one year, compared with the current 80 percent.
Staff writer Mark P. Couch can be reached at 303-820-1794 or mcouch@denverpost.com.
