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From Governing’s Ohio
Back in 1996, Ohio’s political leaders were disappointed to find their state prominently displayed in a television documentary about the nation’s crumbling school buildings. This public relations nightmare has metamorphosed into a public management triumph. 
The state is working hard on an ambitious effort to completely overhaul schools in every one of its 613 districts, at an estimated cost of $23 billion over 12 years. About $4.2 billion has been spent so far — 80 percent by the state and the rest by local governments — and in general the process has been remarkably well managed, with a lot of upfront communication among contractors, school districts, the Ohio School Facilities Commission and local communities. As you might hope, a project of this size and scope has led to important improvements in the way Ohio builds new infrastructure. For example, the statute that authorized the program required that building plans be accompanied by a five-year maintenance plan and the establishment of an ongoing revenue source to take care of maintenance for the next two decades. The state’s previously haphazard and politically motivated funding choices for school construction were replaced by a system that targets the poorest districts first and considers the needs of all of a district’s schools.
The state’s Department of Transportation has gone through a major restructuring, slimming down from 7,800 employees to 5,800 and adopting a set of performance measures that allow ODOT managers to track the state’s 12 district offices against each other in performance. Pavement deficiencies have been reduced by three-quarters in the past decade, and bridge deficiencies by about half. Meanwhile, traffic fatalities have declined substantially. There has been some rethinking on the financial front as well. Ohio has historically been a state whose fiscal officers focused on short-term expenses and revenues, rather than doing serious planning for the future. The school construction commitment has encouraged more of a long-term approach to dealing with money. “In order to understand what our capital capacity would be, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at projected revenue growth,” says Tim Keen, assistant director of the state Office of Budget and Management. This kind of forward thinking is clearly a good thing, as it could help address some pressing problems. The state enacted a 1-cent increase in the sales tax to fill a hole in the current budget, but the tax is due to expire at the end of this fiscal year and there’ll be a $1.3 billion hole to fill. Actually, the whole tax structure could use some reconsideration. Ohio’s corporate franchise tax, for instance, has high rates that might be expected to bring in large amounts of revenue but is vulnerable to corporate tax dodges, which means the state doesn’t get as much as it should. Personnel management is another area in which there is room for improvement. The hiring process is slow and workforce planning has been a low priority. The human resources department has trouble accessing good data because it relies on old information technology that the state initially tried to replace in the late 1990s. That project was a failure, and Ohio has been struggling with dated payroll, accounting and procurement systems for years. In fact, plans for purchasing a new enterprise-wide suite of technology systems had been in the discussion stage so long that some individual departments simply got tired of waiting and bought their own systems. The purchase of software for the whole state was finally made in September, and rollout of the new system should begin in about a year and a half. Although Ohio is still far from a leader in its managing for results efforts, increased attention to strategic planning and performance measurement has been a priority in Governor Bob Taft’s second term. Note: This incorporates two changes from the version that appears in Governing, correcting the title of Tim Keen and clarifying that a 1-cent sales tax increase will expire at the end of this fiscal year.
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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