Results tagged “budgets” from FastGov: Where Government is Going

States begin to disburse hundreds of millions of new stimulus dollars in increased (and sometimes retroactive) unemployment benefits today.*  The cash will hit the streets this week.  It comes with the expectation that unemployed people will spend the extra money and it should provide a needed economic bump to local communities soon after. 

This most recent cash infusion does not change the underlying fact that the size of the hole in the economy is much larger than any of the patches that come with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

It is timely then that the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) is expanding the conversation by returning to some of the core disciplines of public finance, cleverly adapted to the challenges of our time.  GFOA makes a useful distinction between long term financial planning and the more urgent notion of fiscal first aid.

The first aid metaphor works.  The promo piece from GFOA reads, in part, "Fiscal first aid tactics provide immediate relief from fiscal distress, and help stabilize the situation so that more comprehensive treatments can be applied."

The association is offering an Internet course on fiscal triage on May 21, 2009, from 2:00 to 3:40 p.m. (ET), featuring a trio of financial EMTs -- Melanie D. Purcell (Assistant Director, Municipal Technology Advisory Services, University of Tennessee); Timothy J. Soave (Manager of Fiscal Services, Oakland County, Michigan); and Shayne Kavanagh (Senior Manager, Research and Consulting Center, GFOA).

Like the first aid courses offered at your local fire house or community center, GFOA's fiscal rescue and survival skills course will "highlight a variety of fiscal first aid techniques, including their advantages and disadvantages and when it is best to use each technique."

Also like community events, GFOA is passing the hat to help cover its costs -- Government employees pay between $65 and $90 depending on whether they are an associaton member.  Private sector folks are charged $110 (member) or $130 (non member).

To register for GFOA's Surviving Financial Distress: Fiscal First Aid Tactics, follow this link.

If you are interested in how information technology can help change the cost structure of service deliver, download a free copy of the Center for Digital Goverment white paper, Be IT Resolved, a guide to modernizing when you have no money.

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* States were able to adjust the benefits payment systems to accomodate the increased Stim benefits and eligibility periods.  Many states missed a crucial implication of the one time stimulus money.  Payments are typically charged to employers through the companion employment tax systems.  For this exercise, the two systems had to be delinked.  According to anecdotal reports, many states found themselves scrambling to make changes to avoid an unintended (and unauthorized) tax increase.  



 
 

Information technology is a curious artifact in government budgeting and spending.  It is deeply embedded in almost everything government does yet gets called out with unique visibility when it comes to itemizing cuts.

The latest evidence of this trend comes from fiscally weary Michigan when the Granholm Administration announced the most recent mid course correction in order to meet the constitutional requirement to keep the budget in balance:

Executive Order 2009-22, the second issued during the current fiscal year, reduces spending by nearly $350 million, achieving $304 million in the general fund savings.  The reductions will reduce services in some areas of government but will allow the state to protect critical functions of state government like education, health care, support for families in crisis, and job creation efforts.

The 23-page executive order provides an agency-by-agency itemization of the reduction package.  It lists the programs that will take hits, and how large they will be.  And in that respect, information technology is treated as a program (rather than just infrastructure or overhead).  The named reductions to IT projects and other tech spend include:

• Agriculture: $89,000
• Attorney General: $6,400
• Civil Rights: $22,500
• Community Health (Health IT Initiative): $1,072,600
• Human Services: $165,000
• Management and Budget: $200,000
• Military and Veterans Affairs: $3,200
• Natural Resources: $2,400
• Department of State: $300
• State Police: $860,000
• Treasury: $75,500

The spending cuts take $2,496,600 out of modernization efforts  -- an unwelcome development to be sure.  But seen against the $304 million in general fund reductions, IT's share is only eight-tenths of 1% -- compare that to a record (inflation adjusted) 23.5% year over year drop in state revenues.  All things being equal, it is probably less than a fair share.  But not all things are equal.  IT still holds the unique promise for changing the cost structure of service delivery in ways that no other program, overhead or infrastructure can.  Perhaps that helps explain why the cuts were held to less than a single percentage.

All of that from a state that is fresh out of options.  The announcement included the now familiar recitation that moves were made necessary to eliminate a budget shortfall "caused, in large part, by the massive restructuring in the domestic auto industry."  Perhaps that now goes without saying, given that the announcement also came the week that this John Rich single was at Number 12 on the CMT country music chart:

Last December, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire promised a state budget with something for everyone to hate.  Well, not everybody.  To be clear, there is a lot to hate in the painfully balanced budget, which made deep cuts to higher education and health to balance the budget in the face of a $9 billion deficit.  But a new state data center will rise from the budget ashes.

Interim state CIO Jim Albert says that the governor saw the data center and adjoining office complex as so central to her campaign for government reform that the administration held on tight to the new data center as budget negotiations came down to the wire last week.

The new data center would bring the state Department of Information Services (DIS) under one roof for the first time in the agency's history.  It would also provide a fully modern and green platform for the technology component of the administration's shared services strategy, a priority in the administration's reform agenda.

An earlier cost estimate for the new state data center was pegged at $242 million, which would buy 160,000 square feet of data center and another 160 square feet of office space for DIS.  The final deal includes another 80,000 square feet of office space, the occupants for which will be decided by the Office of Financial Management.

The secret sauce in getting a new data center through a nightmarish budget season is the financing structure.  It will be built as a lease back under an arrangement struck by the legislature last year.  Albert says that, with addition of more office space, they have not reached a new guaranteed maximum price with the firm that was selected for the building project.  Those details will be worked out before construction begins.

The outgoing year has given us trillions of reasons to remember it by - because it now takes 12 zeros to count how much economic trouble we are in.  The national debt clock in Times Square ran out of digits in September.  Operators initially removed the dollar sign up front to make room for a bigger number and plan to add a couple of more digits in the new year so the tally can run up into the hundreds of trillions of dollars.  And so went 2008.

As has become traditional each December on this page, with a wink and a nod to Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, here are the five things we'll remember about 2008 five years from now.

1.    Getting over IT's love affair with the general fund.
General fund budgets are easily oversubscribed in times such as these by just the big three categories of state government functions - educate, medicate, incarcerate.  Studies updated this year indicate that only 28 states rely on the general fund as a dominant source for funding state IT programs.  What were once characterized as "alternative" funding schemes have grown up largely under the radar are now essential to the new public sector IT funding mix.

2.    Making green the new green.
While data is not the plural of anecdote, dispatches from the field indicate that the confluence of sustainability sensibilities, energy savings and telework is netting real results.  Witness energy savings of 32% or an estimated $12 million in Virginia by refreshing 60,000 PCs with EnergyStar-rated machines.  Or projected savings of $1 million a year in Washington state through installing energy management software on its existing PC fleet.  Or a double digit spike in server utilization through virtualization in New York.  Consider too that Utah has adopted a four-day work week for public employees that saves trips and saves money while maintaining service delivery thanks to a robust and proven suite of e-government self service offerings.

3.    Putting the public back into public records.
As noted this time last year, disgraced former congressman Mark Foley should have provided a sufficient object lesson that e-mail and instant messages are public - read: disclosable - records.  Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick learned the lesson this year when 14,000 text messages made a liar of him on the stand.  Resignation, criminal charges and conviction followed.  As one legal observer succinctly put it, 'Send Now' May Go Public Later."

4.    Getting us out of the way.
Human latency is the cold, clinical, science fiction-sounding term that engineers use to describe what is wrong with most business processes - the delays we cause through our apparent inattentiveness.  Increasingly sophisticated machine-to-machine web services make human intervention unnecessary, and the presence feature in unified communications promises to track us down when we're needed - on the device of our choice, of course.

5.    Confronting the point where mobility and utility computing meet.
Speaking of devices, mobility means that smart phones are more than cameras, e-mail clients and music players.  They are computers that work really well in uncontrolled environments.  Mobility has its own top level domain (.mobi) and is going mission critical with mobile ERP applications in the labs and soon on the streets.  Imagine the possibilities.

On the threshold of a new year, there is at least the prospect that a viable and sustainable future is literally in the hands of the people government serves and figuratively in the cloud.  Surely we can do something with that.


A version of this post was originally published as "Not that We're Likely to Forget" in the print edition of Government Technology magazine in December 2008.