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We often spot recurring themes in audits – questionable data quality, inadequate prioritization, limited capacity and performance that falls short of standards. All of these issues were present in an audit we just read from the Office of the City Auditor in Austin. The topic was City Utility Street Cut Repairs. The problem: A repair backlog of 3,864 utility cut patches. These are patches put in place by Austin Water, when it cuts into the street to fix leaky water pipes, for example. An average of 185 utility cuts are made each month. Thirty days after the temporary patch is in place, the Austin Public Works Department takes over responsibility for fixing the street in a more permanent way. City code says temporary patches shouldn’t be in place for more than 90 days. The audit team looked at ten randomly selected patches and found not one had met that standard. The audit shows how problems can be built into the staffing structure of city departments. It should not really be a surprise to anyone that there’s a backlog of repairs. While Austin water makes 185 cuts each month, Public Works, with a repair staff about half the size, fixes an average of about 89 per month. A similar situation was found by the Austin audit office in 1998. Resource shortages for Public Works are compounded by vacancies in the department. It did start to contract out some of its work in 2016, but it doesn’t have good enough data to evaluate whether more contracting would be cost effective or whether the solution instead would be more staff. Another problem: the audit found that prioritization was weak. Although some patches are more treacherous than others, there is no process to move more dangerous patches to the front of the cue. As the audit points out, some of the temporary patches “are unreliable and possibly unsafe due to issues with age or height.” Data, in general, was cited a number of times as a problem in this audit. Information on cost effectiveness is missing and there are data inconsistencies in the records held by Public Works and Austin Water. These problems make it difficult to get a consistent and accurate read on the true size of the backlog. “As a result, Public Works management cannot be sure the information they report or use for planning or resource allocation is accurate,” the audit says.

In our March 23rd Governing column, we wrote about Generation Z. That’s the age group that’s just now entering the workforce and making the Millennials feel old. We mentioned a few different characteristics common to this group of new public sector employees. Having lived through the recession at a formative age, for example, they are more inclined to want security and are less impatient about getting quick promotions. In a yet-to-be published survey by the Center for Generational Kinetics, they show a stronger desire to help their communities than the Millennials, Gen X or us Baby Boomers. Of course, it’s still very early to tell too much about this new generation, of which the oldest were born in the mid-to-late 1990s and the youngest are about seven years old. Here are some additional tips for managers, public or private, who are just beginning to welcome the oldest segment of this generation into the workplace. Training may need to focus more on basics – phone and face-to-face office etiquette, dress expectations and so on, as they may not have a lot of work experience. Summer jobs have been hard to come by in the 21st Century and teenagers have so many extracurricular activities that the percentage holding an afterschool job has been quite low. As we mentioned in our Governing article, extra training may be needed for dealing with face-to-face encounters. The generations have gotten steadily weaker at this, according to a survey by generational consulting firm BridgeWorks, which found that 74 percent of Gen Z (compared to 50 percent of the oldest set of Millennials) struggle with in-person communications. Visual training beats text for a generation that reads less. Accommodate the idea that work and fun can be mixed. Gen Zs have spent their lives in a world in which communication is constant and access to work and play occurs throughout the day rather than being separated into distinct segments. Bolster your employee assistance services. We spoke with Cris Zamora, the coordinator of the employee assistance program in Milwaukee. He has found that the city’s youngest workers come in for financial advice and emotional counseling with disproportionate frequency. Workers under age 25 were 3 percent of the city workforce in 2016, but 12 percent of the individuals who were served by employee assistance. In contrast, 26 to 35 year olds made up 26 percent of the Milwaukee workforce and accounted for 4 percent of the employee assistance cases.

We launched our website in January and are enjoying writing about a wide variety of government topics. But we don’t have a search mechanism (yet) and we realize that when one of our posts drops off the first page of this blog, it pretty much disappears from view. You have to be a pretty intrepid reader to scan back to see what we wrote last week or the week before. But many of the topics we cover remain timely. In addition, we are very happy with the number of new readers we’re getting every day and are eager to share past posts, as well as new ones. So, when every quarter ends, our plan is to put together a subject index to the blog posts from that period. We’ve put the First Quarter Subject Guide in the Resources section of our website. We’ve included links to blog posts from January 4th to March 31st. You’ll see we’ve covered a wide variety of topics in these three months (water leaks, unengaged state employees, misleading road signs, annoying meetings,  smelly tax collections for recreational marijuana, the big lies of government, etc.). Take a look and see what you may have missed. And while you’re visiting our website, check out our home page for this month’s multimedia feature on early 20th Century budget transparency, our “Hot off the Presses” section for links to what we’ve written elsewhere, and our Guest Column, where we feature a new — and very feisty — column by Minnesota State Auditor Rebecca Otto.

There are lots of ways in which we differ from typical journalists. We research and write for a variety of non-journalistic organizations, whether they are governments, membership organizations or think tanks. We give speeches and when government officials call asking for counsel on a variety of topics, we don’t hesitate to help. The other difference between us and a lot of reporters who are covering government is that we’ve been doing it for a very long time and have some personal historical perspective. Recently we wrote a blog post for The Fels Institute of Government, where we’re senior fellows, about the troubled partnership between government and the press. That piece was mostly geared to people in government or those who want to be. Here, then, is the other side of the coin – what we’ve learned that we’d like to share with people in the press who are covering state and local government. Their numbers are diminishing, sadly, and so we think it’s important that the remaining cadre of statehouse and city hall reporters are as close to exemplar as possible. Some thoughts: Don’t expect rapid change when new policies or practices are introduced. Articles that take governments to task for the absence of results shortly after a new policy is put into place can miss the fact that it takes time to implement almost any new policy — and if the results aren’t immediate, it doesn’t mean that it’s a failure.  By the way, this was a comment we made to Kim Geiger, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, when she interviewed us several weeks ago about the political realities encountered by Gov. Bruce Rauner’s “superstar team.” Social policy issues are complex and despite the publicly absolutist stance taken in political discussions, government practices and policies are rarely all bad or all good. They usually have some elements that are working well and others that cause problems. A flaw, or even a bunch of flaws, in a new policy may not signal the need for the policy to be abandoned. It’s kind of like the proverbial dike with a hole. The solution isn’t  to tear down the dike, but to stick a finger in the opening. Government officials who are trained to deal with the press (actually just about anyone who is trained to deal with the press) have learned to skirt questions asked so they can answer entirely different questions of their choosing. At various times we’ve had media training, and this is exactly what we’ve been told: “Don’t worry about the questions you’re asked. Just answer the question you wanted to be asked.” We try hard not to let government officials get away with this frustrating  bait and switch. Tamp down on cynicism. All journalists covering government have been lied to at various points in their careers, but in our experience — and we’ve had thousands of interviews covering every state and large city and county in the country — we’ve  found that most government employees are diligent, hardworking and inclined to be as candid as they’re permitted to be. Just because a policy or new program is passed by the legislature and is signed by a governor doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. If a bill isn’t funded, the fact that it passed may only be symbolic. We wish more journalists would follow up on important new policies to see what’s actually happened after some legislator ballyhoos this grand accomplishment. Most ideas in government have been tried before. Just check out our new slide show on transparency on the home page of this website and you’ll see all the new ideas about budget transparency that were on exhibit in 1908. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with trying them again. “Whatever government tried before in performance management, can be tried again, with the new technologies available,” John Kamensky, Senior Fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government told us some years ago (John is also an advisor to Barrett and Greene, Inc.)

Since we constantly need to pay attention to deadlines ourselves, we’ve always been startled when governments appear to be oblivious to them. The deadline dilemma comes to light, most often, with delayed financial reports. We know it’s difficult to get them done on time, especially with old and clunky (or new and confusing) technology systems. We also know finance officers — particularly in smaller entities —  struggle to implement changing standards from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. But, still . . . Our most recent example comes from Missouri. Last week, auditor Nicole Galloway released a list of cities, villages and other political subdivisions, noting their performance in getting their annual financial reports in on time. Missouri statutes require that they be submitted to the auditor’s office within six months of the end of the entity’s fiscal year. Galloway’s list pointed out that for the 3,259 local Missouri entities with fiscal years that ended on June 30th, only about 60 percent filed in a timely way. About ten percent filed after the deadline and another 30 percent still had not handed in their required report, as of the end of February. “We continue to see poor compliance with the financial reporting law, which highlights the need for stronger measures to enforce compliance,” the auditor said last week. Similarly, in January, the New York State Authorities Budget Office produced a list of 124 authorities that had failed to report annual or audit reports on time. A couple of years ago, we wrote a Governing column called, Financial Reports: Better Late than Never? The question mark at the end of that headline was important. There’s a huge amount of expert commentary on the importance of getting reports out in a timely way. At some point, a late report becomes interesting as a historical document, but loses the potential to inform current decisions.

There’s a lot that the governors’ state of the state addresses have in common. They generally start with thanks to parents, spouses, children and fellow leaders; contain quotes from former governors and Presidents (Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan are the favorites); honor notable citizens, share anecdotes, bemoan hard choices and boast about economic development success. We’ve been reading all of the governors’ speeches. Transcripts are generally made available through Office of the Governor websites. (Links to the speeches are available from a number of sources. We use the resource list compiled by the National Association of State Budget Officers.] One governor’s state of the state address stood out to us this year and not because of what he said. In Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s state of the state transcript, the facts used in the speech are linked to source material. We know that other governors may have footnoted versions of their speeches behind the scenes, but we have not seen one that is so easily available and so painstakingly referenced. We think this is a grand idea. With verifiable and questionable statistics flowing so freely through the Internet, it is good to know where facts come from. You can still question the sources, but at the least, you know what the sources are. We have long been a big fan of factcheck.org, which dissects political rhetoric on a daily basis, quashes wild Internet rumors, and helps citizens separate facts from alternative facts. So, we turned to Eugene Kiely, the organization’s director, to see what he thought of Gov. Walker’s copiously-linked speech transcript. “It’s a great idea,” he told us. “It makes it a lot easier for the public and for fact checkers to check sources and to see what they’re saying is accurate. So, kudos.” Kiely also provided a caveat. You still have to look deeply at what’s being said and what’s being left out. In 2015, his organization, which normally does not fact check state of the state addresses, did examine those that were made by presidential candidates. Gov. Walker was in the presidential contender category and his 2015 state of the state was critiqued by factcheck.org, which questioned his statements that ACT scores were up and that they were the second best in the country. Fact checking showed that ACT scores not up, but were actually quite stable. They were the virtually the same as when Gov. Walker first took office in 2011. They were second best, but Factcheck.org noted that the piece of information that was left out was that Wisconsin was second out of  the 30 states that use ACTs, not 50. This year, anyone listening to the Wisconsin speech would also have heard about the state’s record on the ACT. “We just started including everyone in the ACT tests and Wisconsin is one of the best states in the country in that category,” Walker said. This is a true statement. But for those reading the transcript and following the links, the fact is also put in context, with information taken from an August 2016 ACT publication. “Among the 18 states that administered the ACT to all students in 2015, this Wisconsin graduating class cohort ranks 4th in average ACT Composite score.”

We’ve talked with quite a few procurement officials over the last few years and we know how much time is spent negotiating prices in government-wide contracts. They are established through a competitive bidding process, in which winning vendors are selected to supply a city, county or state with the goods it needs, like reams of paper, chairs, lamps, waste baskets, cars or car parts, and so on. But even if a contract has been negotiated sensibly, actually implementing it can be tricky. A March 2017 audit in Atlanta spells out the problems that occur when agency documentation of purchases is poor, contract price lists aren’t updated regularly, and invoices reveal big discrepancies between contract prices and what agencies actually paid for goods they purchased. We’re not talking about small potatoes. Atlanta spent $43.8 million on its annual commodity contracts in 2016. The audit looked at the city’s 12 largest vendors for these purchases and found that 80 percent of the invoices the audit team sampled showed discrepancies with the contract list price or involved a contract price list that had expired. One of the problems cited in the audit is poor documentation by agencies. This not only compromises the city’s ability to know that it is getting the best prices, but also impedes its ability to analyze purchases so that it can potentially achieve higher discounts and utilize rebates from vendors. The audit suggests that the city also could achieve potential savings by joining with other governments in cooperative purchasing agreements. Multi-government cooperative contracts increase negotiating power, enabling all the participating governments to get better prices. About 15 months ago, the Atlanta City Council voted to establish a more centralized procurement system. This reorganization, which is still ongoing, involves moving some agency personnel to the Department of Procurement, and should help fix some of the problems cited in the audit. A technology upgrade is also expected to help as will closer monitoring of invoices and clearer rules both for conducting purchases and documenting them. The Department of Procurement has agreed to all the recommendations made in the audit. We suspect the recommendations would help many other governments, as well. As the audit reports, “Enforcing contract terms and analyzing spending to leverage buying power can achieve significant savings.”

When Thomas Greitens shows his students photos of “Budget Exhibits” from the early part of the 20th Century, they are shocked. “It’s a weird idea to have a budget exhibit and have a hundred thousand people coming to it,” he says. Now largely forgotten, budget exhibits spread through the country in the first two decades of the 1900s. Then, in the 1920s, they were largely abandoned as being too political. “That’s an unknown story in public administration about how the early reformers tried to engage citizens. But that was the goal – to engage citizens so they could understand complex issues more clearly,” said Greitens, associate professor at Central Michigan University and Masters of Public Administration program director there. With his help, and the skills of our son and daughter-in-law, Ben Greene and Madeline Walter, we created the slide show that will be up on our home page over the next few weeks. It shows the material used in budget exhibits in New York, Spokane and St. Louis, which utilized charts and cartoons to educate and engage. Greitens first learned about budget exhibits when he was getting his Ph.D at Northern Illinois University. “My professor, Irene Rubin, was well known for teaching the politics of governing. She had done research on the early reform movement and had mentioned these budget exhibits in class.” But Greitens didn’t have a full sense of what these exhibitions looked like until he started collecting early photos himself. The pictures he has shared with us, provide a good reminder that “there is really nothing new under the sun.” We often talk with government managers who have introduced new ideas into their cities, counties or states, not realizing that the same ideas were introduced a decade or more before. In fact, transparency and performance measurement in government management both have a long history behind them and there are multiple lessons to be learned from their past success and failures. Charts and graphs are now widely used on the Internet to explain different aspects of government finance, but Greitens muses over whether the idea of an educationally-oriented budget exhibit might have merit today, particularly since citizens no longer have the civics training they once had. “We could use the budget exhibit to educate citizens today about the budget, about the complexities of the budget, how decisions are made and the outcome of budgeting decisions. Get them thinking about budgeting in new ways.”

You can barely find a list of “ten tips for better government,” in which a word like “partnership” isn’t used and we’ve detected a surge in the frequency of its use. Partnership is at the center of the Smarter School Spending program sponsored by The Government Finance Officers Association, in which school districts apply to be part of the “Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting.” As described by Shayne Kavanagh, senior manager for research at GFOA, the goal of the program is for local alliances to develop new collaborative decision-making processes in schools in hopes that they get a bigger bang for their limited buck, with well-researched curriculum decisions driving the budget rather than the budget driving the curriculum. Not just any school district can join. Applications must be signed by both finance and academic officials. “It’s a finance and academic partnership that gets them talking together and pulling together. The focus is on making good financial decisions and good academic strategy decisions,” said Kavanagh. The alliances are guided by a bundle of key principles including encouragement to be widely inclusive (bringing superintendents, school boards and community members into the problem-solving process) and to evaluate what they do. Local alliances are aided by a set of techniques provided by GFOA and enhanced by conversations with other district alliances. We were attracted by the lack of dogma in the approach and the focus on local decision-making based on local needs. Some of the success stories are described on the website — for example, how Traverse City Area Public Schools in rural northern, Michigan, increased student math scores. The school district saw that its math scores were below the state average, even though reading scores were above. Using the Smarter School Spending framework, they analyzed the root cause of the problem and found that teachers and administrators had a lot of problems with the curriculum and decided they needed a better one. “The standard way of doing that is to send out bids and get proposals and have vendors pitch to you,” said Kavanagh. Instead, a wide variety of players in the school district decided to run their own local pilot study, trying out three different math curriculum options in three volunteer schools. The other district schools were the control group. On cost and performance one method clearly came out on top. Teachers and the school board were convinced; the new curriculum w📷as put in place and math test scores rose. A very important additional element: Teachers and administrators saw budget officers in a new light. They were part of a team looking for a best approach and not just to dictate the dollars that could be spent. In addition to describing a number of other success stories, the Smarter School Spending website also provides details on the research-based framework and gives school districts a substantial set of GFOA resources.

While recreational marijuana has provided a windfall in new taxes for some states, it also introduces some knotty administrative issues. Since the federal government still considers marijuana a controlled substance, many businesses have a hard time utilizing traditional banking services. That mean taxes on marijuana are often delivered in cash. In this highly technological e-everything world, that can be a challenge to state revenue departments. Cash needs to be handled in a different way. It requires special equipment and additional staff to count and deal with the money. New controls and security measures are also needed when you have lots of cash on hand. Then there’s the odor. It turns out that marijuana cash, often delivered in person by retailers, smells like marijuana. Oregon is solving this problem by renovating the Department of Revenue building in Salem with a new five-station payment area, according to an article in The Portland Tribune. That’s expected to cost in the $800,000 range. A second round of bidding on Oregon’s request for proposals for a contractor, was closed yesterday. (The first round, earlier this year, didn’t get the department what it wanted.) Not all retailers pay their taxes in cash. Some have found banks that will do business with them, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the banking industry about enforcement of federal laws, particularly given the current administration’s unfriendly stance to legalized marijuana. Governing published a useful map at the end of January, showing state marijuana laws.

Twenty years have passed since Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) disappeared, replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Notwithstanding all the acronyms, this was a far more important advance than simply shifting around some letters. But what happened since then? Some answers are emerging. First a little background: The reform, established by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, shifted funding to a block grant.  States were given the ability to choose and discard different services. Cash benefits diminished and the focus on “welfare to work” greatly expanded. Time limits were put on receiving assistance and variations in the way states ran their programs expanded. This month, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin released an excellent short issue brief focused on the impact of reform. It’s based on a meeting of policy-makers, practitioners and researchers that was hosted by the Brookings Institution Center on Children and Families and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research The brief starts out with the good news, including major improvements to child health outcomes since the mid-1990s. Mortality rates, particularly for young black males, have dropped. Teen pregnancies declined as did eighth grade tobacco and alcohol use. According to the brief, “Even in a time of growing income inequality, the well-being of the young has significantly improved, especially among blacks and the poorest Americans.” But the job of figuring out results of reform are hideously complex given swings in the economy and the number of other programs that expanded, or contracted during the last twenty years. It’s likely that many improvements stem more from increased access to health care for children through Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Similarly, the brief cites the Earned Income Tax Credit as likely having a greater impact on work participation than did TANF. Other observations from the brief: TANF had success in increasing job participation for less educated women, though only by 2 to 4 percentage points. While TANF and associated work programs have lifted incomes for mothers with skills, it left behind unskilled workers. This has created a situation in which a number of families with significant employment barriers are cut off from safety net programs and live in deep poverty. According to the brief, “The personal responsibility emphasis of welfare reform was not balanced by a public responsibility to create jobs.” Non-marital births rose as a percent of the total – from 32 percent right before reform to 41 percent in 2013. “Promoting marriage and reducing non-marital births was welfare reform’s least realized goal,” the brief says. Inflation has eaten into the size of the $16.5 billion block grant, making its value about one third less than in 1996. Cash assistance has dwindled enormously from 70 percent of TANF dollars in 1997 to 23 percent in 2014. The brief provides informative end notes, with a multitude of other sources for readers.

Over the years, we’ve had many discussions about the disconnect between  research that goes on at public universities and governments’ own needs for policy research. Universities and governments have different concepts of time, are motivated by conflicting goals and speak in different languages. Result: Frustration on both sides We bring this up because we just watched a really excellent half-day forum that was focused on bringing policymakers and academics together. The February 17th session, “Bridging Research and Policy” was sponsored by the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM) and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Its three panel discussions centered on ways to get legislators to pay attention to research; on building better relations between policy makers and universities, and on evaluation and evidence-based policy making and the uses of government administrative data. More details about the forum are available in this write-up. The forum itself is available in its entirety here. (The intro and first panel discussion actually start about half an hour after the camera was turned on.) Some of the major messages that came across to us: Trust is critical, particularly where sensitive government data is involved, and relationships need to be nurtured. Both researchers and policymakers need a safe space to have discussions with each other in private, without the threat of publicity. Both would be helped if there were a systemized way for governments to know what research universities are currently engaged in. Interaction is more effective than reports. Easy-to-digest visual material is better than lengthy text. Academics could use the skills of marketers when presenting research and should consider the learning styles of individual legislators. Governments should consider research needs for a new program or policy upfront. Timing is critical for everyone. Legislators, particularly part-time legislators, have a narrow window in which they can engage on research topics. Research on program and policy direction should include more attention to implementation issues and cost.