It's really a shame that David Letterman and his sex-extortion scandal are all anybody can talk about in late-night TV right now, because there's some hilarious action going on over on Conan O'Brien's show.
Conan's feud with Newark Mayor Cory Booker rages on!
Seriously, it's pretty funny.
If you haven't been following along, here's the "feud" in a nutshell: Conan made a joke about Newark, Booker banned him from the Newark airport. Conan retaliated by banning Booker from the Burbank, California, airport. Booker responded by telling Conan that New Jersey's 566 municipalities "roll hard[,] roll strong [and] roll together," and that Conan was now banned from the entire state of New Jersey. But not so fast! Now another New Jersey mayor, Elizabeth's Chris Bollwage, has told Conan he's more than welcome in his city.
You can watch Conan's latest volley below. The whole thing is really great, in my opinion.
So you can keep your Letterman staff sexcapades. I'll take Booker/Bollwage/O'Brien.
The classic childhood question is "Where do babies come from?" Well, that's the classic question other than "Are we there yet?"
Since we're all so curious about origins from such an early age, perhaps you've wondered where Governing story ideas come from. Unlike babies, which only come from one source (storks), the answer is all over the place. A good example of the varied origins of Governing stories is a short piece I wrote for the October issue on fire-safe cigarettes.
Unless a smoker keeps puffing, fire-safe cigarettes extinguish on their own. I'd seen several press releases from the Coalition for Fire Safe Cigarettes about their efforts to persuade states to pass laws mandating the technology, but I'd never really thought about writing about them (the pithy answer to where Governing story ideas come from: anywhere but press releases).
That changed a couple of months ago, though, when I read a blog post (warning: foul language) from Andrew Sullivan on the topic. True to his libertarian inclinations, Sullivan was passing along a reader's e-mail that fire-safe cigarettes tasted terrible and that the State of Missouri, by mandating that only fire-safe cigarettes be sold, had given in to its worst nanny-state impulses.
Were states really mandating horrible-tasting cigarettes? I was intrigued, especially when I found out that 49 states had laws mandating fire-safe cigarettes and that most of those laws had passed in the last few years.
So, reading a blog post prompted me to write a print edition story. Now, I'm writing a blog post about reading a blog post and then writing a print edition story about it. Score one for new media.
But, if Governing story ideas come from all over the place, including from blog posts, Governing stories come from only one place: reporting. When I actually started digging into the story, I discovered other angles.
Supporters had been trying for decades to pass congressional legislation mandating fire-safe cigarettes, with no luck. States acted when the feds didn't. In other words, my story ended up being a case study in federalism.
What's more, one reason states were able to act is that the tobacco industry dropped its opposition to the concept. They decided that they could live with a fire-safe mandate, as long as states all did the same thing. So, my story was about the tobacco industry's regulatory strategy and its more cautious posture in a post-Tobacco Settlement world.
In fact, I didn't even end up mentioning the taste issue in my article because it seemed tangential to these other angles. Plus, many people dispute that fire-safe cigarettes taste bad -- and I wasn't about to take up smoking to find out.
Here’s the good news: Thanks to federal stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, states got a lot of help with their Medicaid spending. So much so that, for the first time in Medicaid history, the state share of total spending for the program decreased this year by 3.3 percent, even though overall spending increased by 7.9 percent. “It's unprecedented,” says Verne K. Smith, a former Michigan Medicaid director who is one of the authors of the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual survey on Medicaid spending. “This happened expressly because of the enhanced federal Medicaid match rate.”
The bad news is that the federal stimulus match goes away by the end of 2010, and that will leave states' 2011 budgets with a severe case of sticker shock. That shock will be compounded by the state of state revenues. No one expects them to return to anything remotely close to normal by that time.
When the Kaiser researchers polled Medicaid directors on their top concerns for the future, the sticker-shock issue--what to do when the stimulus enhancement ends--headed the list. “The concerns,” Smith reports, “went far beyond anything we have heard previously. They talked about unthinkable cuts and the continuation of difficult choices.”
What kind of cuts would they be? Nevada's Medicaid director, Charles Duarte, says that when the ARRA money runs out, his program will be have to look at “wholesale elimination of eligibility groups and at big spending categories that involve the aging and elderly.” He noted that home and community based benefits that help keep elderly or disabled people out of institutions had expanded significantly over the past six years, but they may come under the budget knife. Provider rates and professional reimbursements may also be cut, even though that affects access to care. “We're at a point there that may be a secondary consideration,” Duarte says, “if we're going to face the revenue shortfalls we're anticipating as a state.”
Meanwhile, the ARRA funds helped defray cuts that some states, such as Nevada, were already considering for their fiscal 2010 budgets. In all, the survey found, 38 states used the stimulus money to avoid or reduce cuts in provider payments and 36 avoided benefit cuts. Since the federal money was conditional on states not reducing eligibility, 14 states reversed previously enacted restrictions and five abandoned plans to tighten coverage.
Just got out of the panel I co-moderated on Attracting and Keeping Young Leaders in Government. It was great -- one of those terrific sessions where members of the audience and the panel interacted in a true back-and-forth conversation.
Clearly, this is a big topic, and it's one we could have discussed all morning (or longer).
But one of the panelists, Carole Post, director of Agency Services in the office of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, boiled it down in a way that I thought was terrific.
Post said she focuses on "the three A's" in working with young employees: autonomy, access and accountability.
In other words, treat them with respect and give them the autonomy and authority they want. Put them in the room with major leaders and make them a part of large policy discussions. And no kid gloves: Don't give these employees a pass just because they're new, or just because they're young.
Governments are going to need to evolve a lot in order to capture and keep the best of Gen Y. But Post's three A's -- along with Toby Futrell's three F's from yesterday! -- are a great place to start.
Nothing is certain but death and taxes. That doesn't mean they have to occur in the same place.
Anne Gannon, the tax collector in Palm Beach County, Florida, has issued an edict proclaiming that her office will no longer hire smokers.
Existing smokers among her 240 employees get to keep their jobs, but are being "encouraged" to quit, Gannon said. But they will pay more for health insurance: She plans to increase what those employees pay toward their coverage by as much as 20 percent.
Gannon said her goal is to cut down on rising health insurance costs and to encourage a healthier, more productive working environment.
Taxpayers pay $2.5 million a year toward health insurance for tax collector employees, a cost that rose 45 percent in three years, Gannon said. Job seekers will be required to submit an affidavit indicating they are non-smokers to go along with their job application to be considered for employment, according to the new policy.
I agree with the local Republican Party chairman, quoted in the Sun-Sentinel story I'm excerpting, that this is obvious discrimination. But apparently Gannon did her homework and found that the state Supreme Court upheld anti-smoker hiring policies in place in North Miami Beach during the 1990s. Other local governments in Florida have gotten on this bandwagon since then.
It's true that any the current economy, any place to work is a good place to work. But seriously, how can governments transform themselves (or transform the way they present themselves) to be more attractive to potential employees?
That was the topic of the plenary session wrapping up the first full day of Governing's Managing Performance conference.
And it's not just about recruitment: When employers are happy with their workplace, retention increases, customer satisfaction increases, performance results increase, and things like sick leave go down.
So how can governments make sure they're places people want to work?
Toby Futrell, the former city manager of Austin, Texas, broke it down into what she called "the three F's: focus, fun and far-out." That is, a focus on employee satisfaction, a sense of fun and recognition of high performance, and an environment that fosters and nurtures "far-out" innovation and creative solutions.
Steve Stevenson, the commissioner for the Georgia personnel administration, discussed the ways his state has overhauled its HR system in recent years. Georgia has put a pay-for-performance plan in place, shifted to a hybrid retirement program that combines defined benefits and defined contributions, and made it much easier to apply for jobs with the state.
I'm moderating a panel tomorrow morning on how governments can attract young workers. I imagine a lot of the same ideas will play out in that discussion. But I'm eager to hear, too, what specifically governments can do to position themselves as good places to work for Generation Y.
After hearing from Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue earlier this morning about how he's changed state government to make it more efficient, we got a front-lines look at a specific example: Georgia's current, massive effort to outsource its technology.
Patrick Moore, Georgia CIO and head of the Georgia Technology Authority, spoke at lunch, in very specific terms, about the state's effort to outsource its technology infrastructure to IBM, and its telecom network services to AT&T -- a $1.2 billion agreement over the next half-decade.
The project, which the state began implementing in April, has has its share of challenges, including the difficultly of finding vendors willing to embark on such a massive undertaking. And there were problems with the very idea of privatizing, Moore said. "People don't like the word 'outsourcing.' Even today, it sends shivers down the spine of people in government."
But Georgia's IT system -- outdated, outmoded and unable to meet demands -- was a detriment to the state, Moore said. "The real risk for us was not to change. What we learned very quickly was that this was as much about change as it was about technology -- maybe more."
Georgia determined that it wasn't capable of making the needed improvements alone. The state needed a private-sector vendor. In short, Moore said, technology just wasn't a "core competency" of the state of Georgia. "And if it's not a core competency, we shouldn't be doing it."
Great panel discussion this morning on a daunting topic: Is there really anything you can do to change the culture of state governments? Can you really evolve to a government that focuses on performance and results?
As moderator Jim Lientz, the COO for the state of Georgia, said, if you were to ask any average citizen on the street, the answer would be a resounding "no." But there are plenty of states with evidence to the contrary.
One of those states is Maryland, where Governor Martin O'Malley's StateStat approach has helped cement a new focus on accountability and results. The key to making it really happen, said O'Malley's chief of staff Matthew Gallagher, who sat on this morning's panel, is to change the public's expectations of their public leaders.
Gallagher said it was important for O'Malley to identify performance deficiencies and relay those not just to rank-and-file government employees, but to the public at large. One example? The state's 25,000 backlogged DNA samples. That meant hundreds of crimes that had gone unsolved because of government inaction. But that's also an easy-to-understand aspect of performance for both public employees and citizens.
But what about states that don't have that executive leadership on culture change? Diana Urban, the chair of the Results-Based Accountability Workgroup under the Appropriations Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly, has helped shepherd a culture change that's been driven by the legislature. "We don't really have an executive on board" for results-based budgeting, she said. "So what we have done has really changed the conversation on the Appropriations Committee. The conversation has been elevated to, 'What are the results for the people of Connecticut? How are these programs getting us where we want to go?'"
One concrete example? Streamlining the data that agencies produce. Lisa Webb Sharpe, the direcotr of the Michigan Department of Management and Budget, said that her state provides 500 reports from 18 agencies every year. That overload makes the data useless, she said, because no one in the legislature could possibly read it.
Urban agreed: In Connecticut, she said agencies were routinely producing 185-page documents on how they were spending money. "And we were getting these all the time. How many legislators do you think read that?" But she worked to change that. Today, agencies deliver a three-page report clearly outlining how their performance ties in with established results-based accountability goals.
The idea of "CHANGING THE CULTURE OF GOVERNMENT" can be daunting and scary -- and it's easy to understand why a regular citizen on the street would think it can't be done. But when you talk about going from 185-page reports to 3-page reports with easy-to-read graphs, when you talk about clearing out a DNA backlog, you start to see the potential for really evolving government to the next level.
As I mentioned yesterday, Governing chose Atlanta as the site for its 2009 Managing Performance conference. And it wasn't just because you can get a cheap flight to Hartsfield.
Georgia is a state that has fully embraced the drive for better performance. Governor Sonny Perdue's pledge to make his state the best managed in the nation has overhauled the way the state looks at the performance of government. (The results are impressive: Georgia has been the most improved state since Governing began our Grading the States project.)
But for Perdue, the keynote speaker at our conference this year, it all boils down to a simple idea. "What is the definition of 'government'? It's doing things on a daily basis to make people's lives better."
The point, Perdue said, is to solve citizens' problems that they can't solve themselves. In his administration, he said, "we don't talk about mission or strategy -- well, we do talk about them -- but ultimately, when it gets down to what the customer wants, they just want their problems solved."
That's why Georgia has adopted a "full-service, Wal-Mart-type retail mentality," Perdue said. That means a true focus on customer service.
Zeroing in on better customer service isn't just about making citizens happy, though. Perdue said an emphasis on problem solving has inspired motivation and passion in the ranks of the people who work for the state of Georgia.
Bigger than that, though, this focus on efficiency and service has better equipped the state to handle fiscal challenges. Perdue, who took office in January 2003, noted that his administration "is going to be bookended by wonderful revenue losses." But there's a big difference between the financial downturn earlier this decade and the current economic recession. "This time," Perdue said, "because of the culture, the attitude, and the workmanlike competence, it's been better. I won't say easier, but better. Had we not put in place the management changes we have over the past five or six years, we would just be adrift out here."
