COMMENTARY ON COUNTY GOVERNMENT : ‘R’ Is for Recovery but Don’t Neglect Restructuring and Reform : The ballot measure is necessary for short-term fiscal health. After that, we need to tackle the long-term task of reshaping bureaucracy. But it will take guts and fresh thinking.

Orange County CEO Bill Popejoy is right when he argues that there is no reasonable alternative to Measure R, the proposed sales tax increase on the June 27 ballot. The county ought to embrace “R for Recovery,” as Popejoy puts it--but also three other R’s: Restructuring, Results-based budgeting and Reform.

Restructuring involves reorganizing work into self-managing teams that eliminate superfluous mid-level supervisors. Accomplishing it is no small task. The key problems are envisioning new ways of organizing work and overcoming resistance both from those whose supervisorial jobs are at risk and from those who can’t or won’t adopt the new thinking.

Beyond that, effective restructuring takes a bold partner: budgeting based not on caseloads but on outcomes.

Results-based budgeting is too often only rhetoric. But some have made it real: Tennessee, Minnesota, Iowa and Hawaii are basing agency funding on results, not on intake or caseloads.

Results-based budgeting contemplates seeking out the least effective programs, cutting them and transferring a portion of their resources to the most effective programs. Results-based budgeting requires data, guts and fresh politics. Those requirements take us to reform.

Reform must first ventilate Orange County’s presently stuffy government. Replacing elected officeholders might win some fresh air, and further tinkering with elective structures ought to be frankly encouraged.

Making most county offices appointive is a good example: treasurer, auditor, sheriff, district attorney, county school superintendent--the lot. We must ensure the clear lines of responsibility that appointive positions can offer, and as we have seen, it’s harder to fire elected people who don’t do their jobs than to move appointed people.

But in the longer run, reform must connect citizens to local government. Three related strategies are available, congruent with restructuring and results-based budgeting.

First, build upon existing neighborhood and community organizations, erecting new ones where necessary. Look to YMCAs, seniors groups, civic organizations, youth groups, religious congregations, schools, community centers, charities, colleges, city halls, unions, professional associations, corporations and condominium associations. Site appropriate county services in such places. Reach clients, build communities.

Before the fiscal crisis, Orange County’s school-linked service programs led California in moving county staff into schools to work with teams of teachers, nurses, parents and community residents through Gov. Pete Wilson’s Healthy Start program. Though we worry now about the survival of these best-in-state models in a budget-cutting environment, in fact these programs point the way. The model ought to be widely followed as we restructure.

Second, afford clients a leading voice in evaluation of county agencies and programs. Annual client “score cards” are a familiar part of results-based budgeting. Also, ask clients for at least nominal payment for their benefits. Use fees or contributed work not as a budget tool but to mobilize clients to act on their own behalf.

Clients and other members of community organizations in this model are empowered by their numbers and solidarity, their evaluation role and the involvement that paying for services generates. Citizens might then take the next step, engaging their own elected leaders.

Third, then, reshape county government at the top. We need professionals to manage an entity responsible for $3.7 billion in programs, over $3 billion of which comes from other levels of government (federal and state). We also need engaged citizens. Pursuing both brings to mind familiar models such as council-manager local government, and even corporate structures (board-CEO). We can work out the details.

But we urgently need as many as two dozen, preferably part-time, supervisors. If some ran countywide and others in districts composed of two or three cities, we might get elected people who cared about the whole county talking regularly with elected people who were really in touch with their own communities. The cost of elections might drop substantially. Distrust of and alienation from government might decline.

Measure R seems necessary for the short-term crisis. In the longer run, let’s reinvent county government.