More ‘suggestions’ for efficiency, but will anything actually change?
I have been to the garden of jargon in fantasyland. Gov. Ned Lamont’s friends at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have issued their $2 million “report with suggestions on government efficiency.”
The report is the latest in a 70-year tradition of efforts to streamline state government to prepare for the opportunities that challenges will provide. The latest 127 page report (that’s almost $16,000 a page — many with photo fillers from around the state) addresses the coming surge of state employee retirements in 2022.
Next year will bring some changes in benefits for retirees, so a larger than usual number of state employees will retire to preserve the current cost of living benefits. With thousands of employees retiring, state government, the theory goes, ought to be able to deploy technology and modern management practices to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year in employee costs.
Ten years ago, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy relied on employee suggestion boxes to find $200 million in savings when he was, as became his habit, unable to balance a budget. The committee to oversee that plan met once and then disappeared.
Some of the suggestions from BCG for the state “to re-imagine its operations” include raising the student-teacher ratio in technical high schools, “civilianize” some state police tasks, “engage
nonprofits to provide state services,” and create a “Workers’ Compensation/absenteeism/overtime czar.” The report recommends reducing (or as it says “revise”) benefits for injured workers. Someone, according to BCG, needs to detect and investigate fraud in the ranks.
There are some management suggestions in the March 31 report that ought to delight nonunion managers. Connecticut leads most states with 90% of its state employees in unions, far higher than most other states. This as BCG, gently points out, can cause the government to be less nimble than other states in managing its operations. The benefits of public employee unions are significant enough that many employees do not want to take the pay and benefits reduction that can come with a promotion to management.
BCG has some suggestions on how to encourage state employees to become managers. Create “a structured recognition program supported by clear, achievable and objective metrics.” Those include, and I’m not kidding, “non-cash awards such as ‘kudos,’ additional paid time off or sabbaticals, small gift cards, uniform decals, and symbolic tokens.” There’s also a “Lunch with Leadership” suggestion. Let’s try that one now. Gov. Lamont can invite the BCG authors of the report to lunch and see if they will give back some of the money we paid for this report. Maybe if he throws in some uniform decals and a few Dunkin’ Donut gift cards they’ll lop more of the tab.
As the fever of trains and public transportation grips state leaders, others may want to look at what an ongoing mess it is. Shore Line East, the passenger train service that begins in New Haven and runs, yes, east, is one of the highest cost commuter rail lines in the country. Every time a passenger steps on one of those trains — and it’s not often — we subsidize the ride by more than $50 per person. It would be cheaper to send them to the beach in cabs.
To see how nimble state government can be, let’s do a transportation test run. The criminal courthouse in Manchester has been closed during the pandemic. Its operations are occurring at one of two courthouses in Rockville, 12 miles away.
For some parts of the area the Manchester court district serves, it can be a challenge to get from home to the courthouse in Rockville. This is not the sort of challenge the judicial branch of state government has the resources or experience to handle. The governor ought to step in and deploy the synergies of innovation that BCG hails and help people who have to get to Rockville before he starts tearing up highways and laying new commuter railroad tracks.
The writers of the report say almost a third of those prospective retirees will leave Connecticut. BCG did not delve into that phenomenon but posits that “this figure is much higher than in previous years.”
Such an outcome could have implications across various state tax bases (e.g. sales tax, capital gains, property tax).
It will take more than $2 million in suggestions to solve that problem.