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From Governing’s Kansas
Traditionally, Kansas has had an internal coordination problem — or, to put it more simply, the right hand frequently hasn’t known what the left hand was doing. A few years ago, the state was reexamining its water-quality standards, and it turned out that the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Health and Environment were advocating two totally different approaches, ones that were in fact contradictory. “That’s not healthy,” says Environmental Director Ron Hammerschmidt. Now, though, problems such as that will be less likely to crop up. The current governor, Kathleen Sebelius, has told agency managers that “there will be no public disputes between or among state agencies, that the agencies will be consistent and in line with the administration’s policy.” 
It will take some time to judge the success of that edict. What’s clear already, however, is that Sebelius has managed to bring an expanded set of players to the policy-making table. Personnel planners, for example, are now involved in cabinet discussions, which never happened before. “Governor Sebelius’ goal is to have us work as one state, not a group of agencies, and all of the human resources planning has pretty much followed that,” says the HR director, Jack Rickerson. The state’s chief information officer also reports directly to the governor now. Kansas does not have a stand-alone strategic plan, but its budget includes outcome-based performance measures for most policy areas, and for the past decade, agencies have submitted strategic plans in addition to their budget requests, which outline targets and measures. “We don’t claim we’re doing performance-based budgeting,” says the state budget director, Duane Goossen. “I like to think of it more as ‘performance-informed budgeting.’ Certainly, we look at the data for every agency.”
Personnel management in Kansas has a strong focus on planning. Although most personnel functions have been decentralized to the agency level over the past two years, the central office meets quarterly with each agency to get personnel feedback, and agencies are surveyed annually about whether their human resources needs are being met. Planning so far hasn’t been enough, however, to combat the state’s inability to retain employees. The problem, in part, is the salary scale: State salaries have not been aligned with areas of greatest need. State veterinarians begin at pay grade 17, while entry-level professionals in mental health start at grade 10. That helps explain why turnover among mental health trainees was 91 percent in 2003. Planning is also strong in the transportation field, but in the view of some, the blueprints are a little on the rigid side. Kansas is now halfway through the second of two 10-year capital plans and is largely locked into the projects outlined when the current plan was adopted in 1999, even though transportation infrastructure needs have changed. One strong point of the plan is that more than half the funds are funneled to maintenance. For capital construction outside the transportation field, the state’s legacy of managerial fragmentation remains a problem. Capital needs are assessed and funded purely on an agency-by-agency basis, leaving the state ill-equipped to meet some of its most pressing needs. “What are priorities to one agency might not be priorities to another,” says one state official. “Some agencies may have one building, so their capital budget is going to the renovation of a conference room. Whereas another agency has a high-rise building without a sprinkler system. The life-safety issue may actually suffer because of the way the money gets sent out.” Financially, Kansas is in fairly good structural balance, although it did take on a rather large borrowing commitment in 2003 to cope with short-term expense needs beyond the general fund. Over the long term, the state has a notably even-keel revenue stream, split among personal income taxes, sales taxes, and excise and corporate income taxes. The accounting system, though, is out-of-date and makes conforming to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles more difficult. “It’s a little hard to grab information from it,” says Goossen. “It’s not as flexible as we wish it were.”
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