A not-so-hidden secret

This is the time of year when legislators start to focus on what should arguably be the most important part of their job, the development of the state budget. 

State Reprenstative Jason Murphey

Unfortunately, there is a not-so-hidden secret that will shock and surprise most taxpayers.

For most lawmakers, the budget process involves little more than discussing the highest level negotiating points and then almost immediately casting a “yes” vote on $7 billion of appropriations. For them, that’s about the extent of the budget process. 

Frankly, it’s a bad process that fails to utilize the time and talents of individual legislators who should be charged with safeguarding taxpayer dollars. 

I think legislative leaders should assign the purview of specific agencies to legislative members based on their unique talents. The state’s accounting systems recognize 208 individual government agencies. Most of these agencies could come under the purview of a single member of the House. Once assigned, the member would be provided with full access to payroll, purchase card spend and vendor payments register for each agency; given the budget work program documents which show all spend (not just the appropriated monies); and perhaps most importantly, receive performance benchmarks and measurements of the agency’s deliverables. 

This level of specialization will allow the assigned member to get to know those who work within the agency. He will find that his best information comes not from those who are at the agency’s top echelons, but from those who work deep within the agency and who would never come into contact with legislators were it not for the member-driven budget and specialization.

The importance of building relationships with ground-level agency personnel can be perhaps demonstrated by the recent success of a freshman representative. Over the last few months, he has spent time at one of the state facilities inside his district. He built a relationship with an employee who told him about millions of dollars of waste through the inefficient use of technology and because a vendor appeared to be gaming the system. He acted on this input and asked our Budget Chairman and me to help him investigate. After a few weeks of investigation, it was determined that the vendor truly appeared to be overcharging the agency — and state purchasing officials took action to remedy the situation. This one action by a freshman representative will likely save millions of dollars over upcoming years. 

His work also brought to light a possible concern that inefficiency was intentionally left unaddressed as a way to bring about an unfavorable comparison with a possible privatization proposal. The potential vendor could seemingly drop his cost and the casual observer would not realize that the inefficient spending may have been intentional so the privatization proposal could appear to save money.

I firmly believe this one instance could be repeated time and time again if our budget creation process were to allow all members of the Legislature to build these types of relationships with the agency personnel who are buried within the bureaucracies. 

This should be the last year when legislators stand idly by while failing to hold state bureaucracy to account. We can and should do better!

Thank you for reading this article. Your interest and input are much appreciated. Please do not hesitate to email [email protected]with your thoughts and suggestions.