Slapdash Effort Is Touted as Revolution

Many years ago, when I was reporting from the capital of a large Northeastern state, I developed a couple of theorems regarding reform proposals for state governments.

One is that reformers always find there are either too many state agencies or too few.

If a state has lots of departments and regional offices, the reformers will propose creating a few superagencies to enhance efficiency. But if a state has lots of big centralized departments, they’ll propose breaking them up into smaller bodies to bring government closer to the People and, yes, enhance efficiency. As a corollary, whichever step is taken, within three to five years it will be deemed a failure and the alternative will be tried.

The latest test of this finding comes courtesy of the California Performance Review, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s over-hyped “streamlining” of state government.

A close look at his proposal is timely because it has crossed a key threshold: With a hearing last week at UC Irvine, the citizens commission that the governor appointed to take testimony on the plan completed its work and issued a joint paper on its findings. The performance review now goes to state agency heads, who will pick over the 1,200 recommendations and comment on those pertaining to their departments. Schwarzenegger then will decide which of the remaining measures to submit to the Legislature or (if possible) implement on his own.

I don’t intend to demean the efforts of the 275 state employees who labored on the review under severe time pressure. But testimony at the commission’s hearings suggests that an effort once labeled, with the usual tiresome gubernatorial hyperbole, “unprecedented,” “visionary” and “innovative” has produced a remarkably shallow result.

Some of the commission’s 21 members, who include elected officials, business executives and academics, are plainly nonplused at the slapdash nature of much of the plan and at its hijacking by special interests, who conferred with the reorganization team behind closed doors.

“This commission’s role is to create the illusion of openness,” J.J. Jelincic, president of the California State Employees Assn. and the panel’s most outspoken member, told me during a break in the Irvine session. “These proposals were all developed in secret.”

Much about the performance review makes one wonder whether the governor ever meant it as more than window dressing. Although a successful large-scale reorganization would need to take into account California’s complex politics, Schwarzenegger hired as its co-director a Texas bureaucrat who said at the outset that he intended to visit Sacramento every couple of weeks, when he could cadge personal time from his job in Austin.

The project team had less than six months to examine the workings of a state bureaucracy that serves 35 million Californians and employs more than 300,000 workers (and that included the time spent writing the 2,500-page report). To guide their work, members of the team were handed a roster of bromides: “Put people first,” “be productive and performance-driven,” “be accountable and efficient,” etc., etc.

Although the governor’s office proclaimed that the staff had “literally combed the world looking for good ideas,” the performance review’s centerpiece turned out to be a version of the bureaucratic reshuffle seen in every such “reform”: the abolition of 119 state boards and commissions and the shift of their responsibilities to 11 mega-departments.

There’s no question that many such boards are merely sinecures for termed-out state legislators and other Sacramento barnacles. But the California Performance Review fails to distinguish between those and the many others that provide the state and its citizens with valuable independent judgments.

The state Air Resources Board, for example -- cavalierly targeted for elimination -- is one of the premier environmental regulatory bodies in the country. (The citizens commission is advising the governor to retain that board and several others.)

This would be amusing if there weren’t a troubling aspect to the proposals: They would concentrate decision making where the public can’t go.

As Robert Fellmeth, a government expert at the University of San Diego, explained to the commission, many of the targeted boards “have to make decisions in public” and “have to hear public comment” under the law. Shifting their duties to appointed department heads, he noted, would mean “someone making a decision in their office, in secret,” after hearing from campaign contributors or from the governor, at whose pleasure the decision maker serves.

Is this really “putting people first”?

Like so much else in the Schwarzenegger era, the California Performance Review amounts to a lost opportunity masquerading as a revolution. A true reorganization, for example, would have tackled foursquare the state’s irrational finances by reexamining Proposition 13 and the rest of our patchwork, ballot-driven tax structure; instead the plan recommends consolidating three state tax agencies into one. Big deal.

Asked at the Irvine hearing why so many of the recommendations seemed so narrow or tilted toward special interests, one of the reorganization staff members responded that he and his colleagues “simply didn’t have the time or resources” to talk to all sides that might be affected by every proposal.

Perhaps unwittingly, he had put his finger on the most important potential “innovation” the California Performance Review overlooked: actually taking the time, and making the effort, to get it right.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.