THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECTReport Card: Florida FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: B Florida expends unusual effort at predicting its financial future: It holds regular expenditure planning conferences on more than 20 subjects, including Medicaid, corrections and school enrollment. And it's well advised to do that: Good forecasting matters enormously here because future fiscal problems seem certain. Due in large part to recent population growth and the burden of various court orders, the outgoing administration anticipated a $300 million budget shortfall for fiscal 2000. Combined with other funds, Florida has about $1.3 billion in reserves, and the state's investment policy is characterized by good returns and careful management. The main problem is that the state has trouble tracking its agencies' current expenditures in a timely way. "Everyone in state government maintains their own systems on the side," says Robert Bradley, who was budget director under the late Governor Lawton Chiles. "It gives the agencies flexibility, because we can't find out what they're doing with their money." And though it has one of the most privatized state governments in the country, Florida also is weak at tracking the performance of contracts after they're in place. CAPITAL MANAGEMENT: C Capital planning in Florida is a very professional process—until it gets to the legislature. "We have an excellent executive-side capital planning process," says Bradley, "but does the capital budgeting process really drive the appropriations process? No." The state is doing a pretty fair job with maintenance—particularly for the buildings handled by the Department of Management Services (about 95 percent of state structures). The department does yearly condition assessments on the buildings under its control. Agency five-year plans include preventive-maintenance strategies. The establishment of routine maintenance, funded through a rental-fee pool paid to DMS by the agencies, is slowly eliminating the backlog of needed maintenance. The remainder of the state's buildings are a problem—and are falling behind in maintenance and repairs. HUMAN RESOURCES: C+ Florida has gone in heavily for decentralization here, aiming to provide more flexibility to its agencies. The agencies make their own hiring decisions. Certified lists are no longer used, and applicants can apply online, which leads to a much broader applicant pool. Agencies can even juggle their own salary accounts to provide increases tied to performance. (Of course, with no additional money provided by the legislature, that's not easy.) Unfortunately, decentralization has created inconsistency in classification practices and use of civil service rules. "The advantages to delegating decision-making probably outweigh the disadvantages," says Terry Perkins, the state's chief union negotiator, "but with that has to come accountability. It puts tremendous pressure on us to educate local managers." Formal workforce planning is minimal. And though the state's performance budgeting and strategic planning efforts help some, control over a great deal of valuable centralized data was essentially lost in the decentralization process. MANAGING FOR RESULTS: B Florida has one of the nation's most ambitious plans for performance budgeting, in which comprehensive measures—with specific targets—are linked to funding. The Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability was established in 1994 to help this process. In addition to performing a substantial number of its own program audits, OPPAGA reviews the quality, appropriateness and accuracy of the measures themselves. All agencies must submit five-year strategic plans on an annual basis, and as the state moves toward performance budgeting, these plans have become increasingly meaningful. On the downside, the state comprehensive plan includes 26 vague goals and 325 policies that are supposed to give guidance to agencies, regional and local governments. It has not been revised since it was put together more than a decade ago, and a committee will be formed this year to review the plan. The Florida Commission on Government Accountability to the People used to set long-term goals for the state and track progress toward reaching them, but the commission was de-funded in the 1998 legislative session. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: C- The systems and processes with which Florida conducts payroll, human resources, purchasing, accounting and budgeting functions aren't meeting the state's technological needs. They are old, difficult to maintain, and don't provide the kind of management information the government should have. A new integrated human resources system is in the pilot stage, however. Oversight and planning of IT in the state is divided between two groups. One of them, the Technology Review Workgroup, oversees and makes recommendations on agencies' information resource management planning and budgeting proposals. Unfortunately, its limited staff means that it tends to focus just on big-ticket items (with an eye toward avoiding a repeat of the state's infamous high-tech welfare system that all but blew up almost a decade ago). On the happier side of the floppy disk, the state requires a cost-benefit analysis for any project that exceeds $500,000 in total cost for a year. Its budgeting and appropriations process is available on the Internet, as are performance measures and state audit reports. Florida's Web site captured top honors as the Best State Government Web Site in the country in the second annual Best of the Web competition.
AVERAGE GRADE: C+
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