Government Reformation

April has been a cruel month up here in Massachusetts. The weather has been chilly and wet (no surprise) and the Red Sox got their 2009 baseball season off to a horrendous start, losing 6 of their first 8 games.

If that wasn't bad enough, the state found itself facing a $1 billion deficit in the middle of the fiscal year, forcing the governor and state legislature to scramble and find ways to patch the gaping budget hole. So far, the suggestions on how to fix the problem haven't been pretty.

After years of just watching revenue grow, even as new more expensive programs were added to the budget, policymakers find themselves facing three stark choices:

• Raise taxes
• Cut services
• Reduce expenses.

Not wanting to raise taxes and damage their chances for reelection, politicians in Massachusetts have opted for cutting services and reducing expenses. The final item on the list means trying to tackle that runaway train known as benefits, a sacred cow to the powerful government unions here.

Despite howls of protest, the unions and their legislative supportors have seen their arguments against change undercut by a series of articles in the (financially vulnerable) Boston Globe that have exposed just how costly and unsustainable some of the agreements have become between the state and its workers.

But that's not the only problem with government in Massachusetts and elsewhere. There's just too much of it. Too many agencies doing the same job (for example, Massachusetts has three large transportation departments).

The problem extends beyond the Boston bureaucracy. Massachusetts has 351 cities and towns, with way too many trying to maintain their own services when, in fact, they should be sharing.

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC news announcer, recently wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times pointing out how costly it has become to maintain government at the state, county and munipal level, especially in rural areas. As an example he cites the 99 counties that exist in Iowa, each with its own set of courts that continue to operate, whether they are truly needed or not.

But it's not all bad news. The city of Springfield, Mass., went bankrupt several years ago after local officials couldn't make the tough choices to raise taxes, cut services and reduce expenses. So the state appointed an independent financial board to take over and run the city 

Today, one of the poorest cities in the Commonwealth (based on per capita income) has a $10 million surplus, despite the worst economy in over 60 years. The board imposed on the city its version of CompStat and put each department under intense performance scrutiny. As a result, the city has slashed a raft of wasteful and unncessary expenses and is saving another $1.7 million annually.

While cuts in staffing have been made, investments in technology are up. Way up. Springfield has implemented an ERP system to streamline financials and HR. And the city is about embark on 311, which will reduce the number of non-emergency calls made to the city's 911 system while improving service response.

Ripples of reform are appearing elsewhere around the country. Will they go far enough? In some regions of the country where the problems are deep, the answer is probably yes. We have the tools, thanks to technology, to share services in a way that wasn't possible 10 years ago. Now it will just take political willpower to make it happen.