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Don’t believe what you see. We get lost a lot. It’s common, in our car, to hear our voices harshly cussing out the GPS (when it starts to assert that it’s “recalculating,” we want to throw it out the window. But at least that’s better than the times when we’re yelling at one another.) With our mutual lack of a sense of direction, we’re particularly dispirited when road signs are unclear – or even wrong. And that happens more often than you’d think. We have to wonder why towns and cities aren’t somewhat more careful on this front. Here’s Exhibit A:  For over a year, we’ve entered the FDR Drive just after 34th street to be greeted by two signs that clearly advise us to get out of the two right hand lanes. They’re “closed,” the orange signs claim. But they’re not. We have never — not once — seen the right two lanes closed in hundreds of times that we’ve taken this route. Changing lanes on this busy three-lane stretch of road is never a snap and so we feel particularly sorry for the folks who don’t know, as we do, that the only way these signs are useful is if you ignore them. So, that’s what we do. Of course, if ever reality matches the signage, we’ll be out of luck, just like all the people who follow them now are.

We keep a close eye on the output of auditors’  offices in states and local governments. We’ll be reporting about them, as a regular feature on this website dubbed “Audit Watch.” Here’s the first one. How transparent are processes for selecting one transportation project over another? Do they utilize understandable selection criteria and benefit cost analysis? The answer was no in Georgia, where a December 2016 audit criticized the selection process.  Problems popped up in both documentation and stakeholder communication, with a poll of officials at Metropolitan Planning Organizations finding that 44 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that the selection process was transparent. “The Planning Division does not require any documentation or explanation for programming a low scoring project ahead of a high scoring project,” the audit said.

In the 25 years we’ve spent watching state and local government, we’ve found ourselves mourning more than a few terrific programs and organizations that have fallen by the wayside. Their demise is sometimes due to cyclical budgetary downturns; sometimes to death blows exerted by powerful political foes. We number among the inhabitants of our virtual government graveyard the Oregon Progress Board, Florida’s Commission on Government Accountability, the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center and, of course, the much mourned U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. But it’s mostly the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center that’s on our minds right now. In the years when we were evaluating government management and performance, we often praised the Center for doing what so many governments didn’t do – think about the future. Today we want to praise it one more time with a posthumous pat on the back, based on a report we recently read about Kentucky’s path away from dependency on tobacco products to a much more diversified economic base. According to an article written by Rebecca Hanchett for the Kentucky 2016 Interim Legislative Record last summer, in 1998, tobacco delivered about 25 percent of the state’s farm cash receipts and was grown by 46,000 farmers. Today it accounts for about 6 percent, involving about 4,500 farmers. This doesn’t mean that agriculture receipts themselves are down. They’re at record levels. But the Commonwealth made some good decisions around the turn of the century to use its tobacco master settlement money to diversify crops. At a Southern Legislative Conference last summer, representatives of several other southern states were chagrined. “They wish they’d done what we we’d done,” said Warren Beeler, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy. Of course, we can’t directly connect the Long-Term Research Center’s excellent 1994 report about the shakiness of tobacco dependency on the decisions that legislative leaders later made. But it certainly did add important elements to the discussion and got leaders talking. We asked Michael Childress what he thought. Childress is currently research associate for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business. He was executive director of the long-term policy research center from 1993 until its demise in 2010. “It’s impossible for me to definitively connect the dots linking this report to the manner in which the tobacco settlement funds were distributed.  I believe that I can say that the report, without question, got decision makers talking about the challenges facing Kentucky’s tobacco industry in a way they did not previously.  It was as if many knew that the emperor had no clothes, but were afraid to say so publicly.  This report, and the accompanying media attention it garnered, provided the political cover that apparently was necessary for state leaders to begin the public dialogue about a post-tobacco rural economy.” We wish the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center still existed and we wish more governments had organizations like this.

We hope the site will be helpful, interesting and even entertaining to you, and that you’ll visit frequently. There will be something new here almost every few days (and our Twitter feed will, of course, be updated several times a day). So, if you’ve gone a week without checking in, we guarantee that you’ll find the visit worthwhile. Future Entrees in the B&G Report space will tend to be tied to the news. (And we think it’s justifiable to claim that this one qualifies inasmuch as it’s pretty big news to us that our website has gone live). The B&G Report feature will give us an opportunity to bring our readers up to date with our insights into the most current events in the world of state and local governments. We may also use this space for commentary from interesting practitioners, academics, elected officials, journalists and so on. New, credible reports about states and localities that come to our attention will also be featured here. Or we may just want to use the space to vent! While we are supporters of the good work that is frequently accomplished by state and local government, we’re real believers in the idea that government should be held accountable. As a former New York City comptroller said “It’s not that government is bad. It’s stupid government that’s bad.” We hope you’ll feel free to go to the “Contact Us” section and respond (especially when we’re mostly voicing our own opinions]. What’s more, if you’ve got something you’d like us to share with our audience – even if it has nothing to do with anything that’s already appeared on this site – please let us know. We’d like the Barrett and Greene, Inc. website to be a virtual conference without any virtual chicken for lunch. (In fact, lunchtime might be a good time to visit us here. Get yourself a nice sandwich, some chips and an appealing beverage, and we’ll be here to educate or entertain you, right inside your computer, tablet or cell phone.) One last note. We’ve covered information technology for years. We wrote a book, Powering Up, about the subject over a decade ago. And one thing we know for sure. Something, or many things, will be mucked up on this site the day it goes live. Sorry about that. Let us know, and we’ll fix it. Welcome, Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene Barrett and Greene, Inc.