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From Governing’s Mississippi
It’s not easy to make management progress in Mississippi. The budget, for example, is based on a strict adherence to individual line items: things like how much money is being spent on out-of-state travel for a particular program or on cell phone bills. While this is not unique to Mississippi, it makes it very difficult to bring any kind of broad-scale changes to programs without going through a morass of very specific alterations to individually budgeted numbers for the state’s eight universities, 15 community colleges, a variety of appointed and elected commissions and a large number of small and separate agencies. 
The legislature doesn’t seem to be concerned about this; in fact, many of the state’s lawmakers revel in the kind of micro-micro-managing such budgets encourage. The agencies, for their part, tend to be deeply fragmented and don’t engage much in broad-based thinking. Instead, many simply seem concerned about getting enough money to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done and to get through another fiscal year. As a result, things in Mississippi that are broken tend to stay broken. For example, the state has historically done a poor job at maintaining its infrastructure. Deferred maintenance on buildings is currently estimated to be $2 billion, out of about $9 billion worth of infrastructure. It may be even worse than that. Only a handful of agencies have even done condition assessments, and the central office’s efforts to track these figures are informal at best. Although the director of Mississippi’s Bureau of Buildings knows how bad the problem is, and would like to do something about it, there are no signs that improvements are on their way.
Similarly, the Magnolia State has a hard time retaining newly hired workers. Managers at the top levels don’t even know whether they’re losing good people or bad people, thanks to a discernible weakness in evaluating performance. The state does perform capably in one area of personnel management: It has decent training programs in place. But the value of these programs is compromised by the lack of adequate information on how individual workers are performing once they have been trained. In 2002, revenues went negative in Mississippi for the first time in history. The state is currently struggling to fund an essentially unaffordable five-year pay raise for teachers. And the decision to shift up to $300 million from roads to the general fund is strangling the Transportation Department’s ability to either build or maintain its highway network. Mississippi’s current governor, Haley Barbour, has been adamant about not raising taxes. That means the state is going to have to make more cutbacks; not an easy task in a jurisdiction that traditionally ranks at the bottom of nearly every list of indicators of social well-being. There are a couple of bright spots. Information Technology Services, with a history of legislative support, has been well-managed for the past decade by David Litchliter, who has remained on the job as his counterparts in other states have come and gone. IT in Mississippi displays a growing focus on planning, as opposed to just procurement of new machines, and is now in the process of expanding its fiber-optic network. That should help agencies to share information effectively. With the help of State Fiscal Officer J.K. “Hoopy” Stringer Jr., brought in after a long career in the military and a stint as state personnel director, Barbour has created a group called “Momentum Mississippi,” charged with writing a long-range plan for the state that focuses on economic development. But, while this is a helpful sign, skeptics argue that a fragmented agency structure coupled with a willful legislature may make the effort little more than a pleasant alliteration.
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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