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New
council embraces long-range planning
Related
commentary:
Planning Virginia's future —
an insider's look
by
Peter Galuszka
Virginia Business
August 2003
In
the early 1990s, Prince William County was in the midst
of a big budget crunch. As suburban sprawl stretched
southward from Washington, D.C., the county couldn’t
keep up with demands on its roads, schools and social
services. Simply raising taxes and cutting expenses
wouldn’t keep the county afloat. Something more
fundamental needed to be done. At the time, Del. Michele
McQuigg (R-Prince William) was a county supervisor attending
meeting after frustrating meeting listening to her county’s
plight.
Then
she heard of a similar problem thousands of miles away
in Oregon. In the 1980s, the state successfully coped
with the struggle of replacing lost revenues. At that
time, Oregon’s crucial lumber industry was collapsing,
and the state couldn’t keep up with the lost tax
revenue and increased unemployment benefits. Former
Portland Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, McQuigg learned, had
won the governorship with a bold plan to set up clearly
defined goals of what the state wanted to achieve and
set benchmarks to achieve them over time. Even the state’s
budget process was keyed to specific goals. Oregon had
problems initiating the system, but it worked.
McQuigg
began listening to consultants about the Oregon experience,
and county staff set up a plan to replicate it. “We
focused on our priorities and that allowed us to fund
core services,” she says. “You can’t
run a government on across-the-board cuts.”
The
concept of benchmarks and performance budgeting pulled
Prince William out of the red. McQuigg, now a delegate
in the General Assembly, is part of a new initiative
to bring those same principles of strategic planning
to the commonwealth. Last month, Gov. Mark R. Warner
swore in members of a new Council on Virginia’s
Future, which plans on deploying the same types of long-range
thinking that a handful of pioneering states have used
to reap what some say is beneficial results.
The
nine members of the Oregon Progress Board were drawn
from private businesses and the public sector. It set
benchmarks for specific tasks like cutting teen pregnancies.
In 1993, Gov. Barbara Roberts took a further step and
started tying the development of the state’s budget
to goals pursued by the board. At the time, Oregon’s
budget was down 10 percent, so Gov. Roberts told all
the state agencies and departments to budget for only
80 percent of their baseline, says David Osborne, co-author
of “Reinventing Government” and an advisor
to Prince William’s effort. But there was an extra
incentive. “They could earn more than 80 percent
if they could show that they could achieve the most
important benchmarks,” says Osborne. “Setting
goals is nice, but until you deal with the money, you
won’t achieve them.”
The
benchmarking process can be used to target any unique
problem. In Oregon it helped boost the number of 2-year-olds
immunized against disease from 47 percent to 81 percent
in a few years.
Other states have tried to follow Oregon’s efforts
with less than stellar results, Osborne says. Both Utah
and Minnesota started councils similar to the Oregon
Progress Board, but the efforts were emasculated when
governors didn’t follow recommendations.
One success story, Osborne says, is Oregon’s northern
neighbor, Washington. Facing a 10 percent budget deficit,
Washington officials added new twists to Oregon’s
approach to performance-based budgeting. The governor
picked 10 desired outcomes and divided the budget around
achieving those outcomes. “They looked at what
they were spending,” says Osborne, “turned
the budget process upside down, and ended up doing very
well politically.”
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