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From Governing’s Idaho
“Idaho,” says Brad Foltman, the state’s executive budget director, “is going further out in its projections than ever before, and seeing the benefits.” That wouldn’t be a controversial move in much of the country — just boilerplate testimony to a long-agreed-upon tenet of good public management. In Idaho, however, it’s a sea change. For years, the state’s leaders made it clear that they simply didn’t believe in long-term planning. “I don’t think a multi-year projection helps keep a state’s focus,” one senior official insisted a few years ago. 
But nobody’s talking that way now. One reason: After years in which the state’s conservative budgeting kept it from any notable disasters, Idaho ran into a fiscal fence in 2001 when an ill-timed package of tax cuts left it in need of an overall revenue increase of 2.5 percent the following year. It didn’t have the money to pay its bills; what it had was a revenue shortfall of 14.5 percent. A record-long legislative session in 2003 was required to negotiate a fix. The solution, arranged by Governor Dirk Kempthorne, was to increase the sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent while cutting agency budgets, developing a long-term planning process, and fostering inter-agency cooperation in search of efficiency. The planning commitment is being taken seriously. A cornerstone of the governor’s recommended budget for 2005, for example, was a mandate to the legislature to extend its revenue forecasts out beyond the previous two-year limit. Perhaps not coincidentally, the legislature has begun to use bonding for some capital projects, primarily on higher education campuses. This has imposed a new level of credit-rating scrutiny never in place before. “It’s nice to have somebody asking what you are doing,” says Foltman. It also happens to be a sound way to manage for future results. Idaho is finally undertaking improvements that many states made a long time ago.
Meanwhile, the state is breathing some life into its 10-year-old strategic planning and performance measurement efforts, which for years didn’t amount to very much. Along with a blue-ribbon commission focusing on long-range issues, the legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluation recently led a review of all the state’s performance measurement procedures. With luck, both will increase the credibility of the process, although the state still has a long way to go in this area. Agencies are learning to work together. These days, says David Ekern, the transportation director, “the theme of Idaho is ’one government and therefore partnership.’ ” A good example: The Department of Human Resources Management and the Department of Commerce and Labor have teamed together to create an “apply online” program for state hiring vacancies. Although the program is stored on Commerce and Labor’s server, it can be accessed by the Human Resources offices, circumventing the common problem of two agency information systems not speaking to each other. All these efforts will be helped dramatically by a new data warehouse located within the state Controller’s Office. The controller, an independently elected constitutional officer, used to view much of the data collected by his office as proprietary. That attitude is gone. Exchange of data has been made a focus, and the closed doors that previously separated the controller, the senior officials in the executive administration and the agency leadership have been opened. The fact that all these arms of government are in the hands of the same political party hasn’t hurt the unification process either. As much as it may enjoy looking into the distant future, however, Idaho needs to think hard about some near-term issues. The sales tax increase is scheduled to sunset on July 1 of this year. In the words of Randy Nelson, president of the Associated Taxpayers of Idaho, “The tax increase might have been the thing that saved Idaho’s structural balance, but when it expires, it will possibly rock it too.”
Copyright © 2005, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc. |
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