Editorial: Ramp up state reform efforts

Star Tribune

This year, as usual, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce's wish list for the coming legislative session begins with the business organization's claim that the state does not need a tax increase.

An unprecedented $6.2 billion forecasted state budget deficit in 2012-13 has not dented the group's antitax resolve.

But the chamber's 2011 policy priority list emphasizes something else worth noting.

In the No. 1 spot is an item more comprehensive than "no new taxes."

Labeled "budget reform and service design," it reflects the business community's belief that outdated, inefficient practices are laced through both the Legislature's budget-setting process and state government operations.

Replace them with modern, businesslike practices -- including reduced compensation for public employees -- and the state's budget problems will largely disappear, the chamber contends.

But it's become more insistent in recent years, even as state and local governments have scoured their balance sheets for savings and have adopted technology-based and cross-jurisdictional efficiencies.

Rather than satisfying the critics, those efforts have inspired calls for more.

The 2011 Legislature looks likely to give cost-saving via budgeting and operational reform its most energetic exploration yet.

The new Republican majorities, elected with strong backing by business organizations, are committed to rigorous priority-setting and government streamlining.

In that exercise, they will be unencumbered by the ties the old DFL majorities had with public employees' unions, which Republicans say constrained DFL attempts at real reform.

He has asked for -- and ought to receive -- business help in identifying possibilities.

All this zeal for government reform is welcome, and ought to be revealing. If it is little more than an excuse for shrinking public employee pensions and benefits, that will be plain soon enough.

If the best efforts at reform still leave a nasty budget gap that cannot be closed tax-free without doing real harm, that too ought soon to be clear.

And if -- as we expect -- a number of promising ideas for long-term savings surface but require an initial infusion of state dollars to pay for necessary transition costs, that too should be evident to the public.

In that event, lawmakers should trust Minnesotans to be smart enough to accept a temporary spending increase now that produces lasting savings later.

The fact that the state budget must be balanced every two years means that short-term funding measures must be pursued simultaneously with efforts to achieve long-term gain.

As former DFL finance commissioner Jay Kiedrowski wrote recently, the fact that new delivery mechanisms aren't the sole solution to the state's problems doesn't mean they should not be pursued.

"The potential magnitude of savings from innovation and service redesign is likely far less than the size of the financial problems ahead," Kiedrowski said. "Yet redesign is still necessary: Minnesota local government officials must change their organizations."

If they don't strive for better, more cost-effective practices, governments will lose public trust, and that will ultimately lead to an inability to solve state problems, he argued.

So let the resolve to redesign redouble in St. Paul and in Minnesota's local governments.