House Appropriations gives “Challenges” bill a once-over, weighs impact on human services, corrections, education

The draft legislation for “Challenges for Change,” the government reorganization plan lawmakers and the administration are pursuing as a way to cut costs and make state services more efficient, hit a speed bump Wednesday.

The Vermont House Appropriations Committee sent members from three other committees back to the drawing board and asked them to significantly revise language in the draft legislation for S.286, which the Senate had approved on Tuesday.

The bill is meant to be ready for the governor’s signature on Feb. 19, so that state agencies can begin to fill in the blanks – to address the logistics of how they will shave $38 million from the budget and streamline services through technology and better communication between departments. In the meantime, the House and Senate are fine-tuning the language of the bill.

The Vermont Legislature and the Douglas administration are faced with a $151 million budget gap this year because of a significant decline in state revenues projected to continue through 2014, according to the Department of Finance and Management and the Joint Fiscal Office.

Administrative officials and legislative leaders have said repeatedly that the “Challenges” restructuring will not lead to significant reductions in the state’s workforce. However, some of the potential changes listed in the original report from the Joint Legislative Government Accountability Committee include closing a state prison, raising eligibility standards for elderly Vermonters who receive state support for long-term care, elimination of side judges in the state’s court system and the renegotiation of contracts with outside firms who provide goods and services to the state.

The “Challenges” bill, S.286, is essentially a list of new “outcomes,” or overarching goals, for eight areas of state government, including human services, education, natural resources, the prison system and economic development. Human services is faced with cutting $16.7 million in programs — nearly half of the $38 million Challenges cut in fiscal year 2011 — and encompasses four different “challenges” for reorganization.

Lawmakers have been charged with developing outcomes they want to see the administration achieve—the “what”; the departments are charged with coming up with the “how”–specific policies that will enable them to deliver on the “results-based” outcomes.

House Appropriations members applied the Goldilocks principal to the “outcomes language.” They told their counterparts from the House and Senate Human Services, Judiciary and Education committees Wednesday afternoon that the language they had developed was either too vague or too specific and that they were looking for policy that was just right, one that would give the administration enough room to make unfettered decisions about how to implement programs and the Legislature enough specificity to allow lawmakers the ability to measure results.

With the devil often in the details, for members of the House Appropriations Committee those details often came down to semantics, but words matter greatly in the world of policy.

Sometimes a change from “shall” to “may” was at issue. In other cases, it was a word like “ensure” or “improve” that launched debate.

The word “outcome” itself was often batted about, and each member seemed to rely on a slightly different connotation depending on the context. Outside the realm of lawmaking, diction can seem like a minor affair, but when it comes to policy, words become law.

Human services

Rep. Sandy Haas, P-Rochester, explained that her committee, House Human Services, and the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, adopted outcomes that already exist in current law, many of which were developed in the 1990s.

The outcomes in the draft legislation address economic independence, better communication between Agency of Human Services departments, a “client-centered” approach to services, and cost-effective use of state resources.

Rep. Mark Larson, D-Burlington, said he worries that if language of the bill is too vague, the intent will be misinterpreted and leave needy Vermonters in the lurch.”

In general, members of the committee expressed dismay with the goals listed in the human services section of S.286 because they felt the objectives as listed wouldn’t be specific enough to hold the administration accountable.

Rep. Mark Larson, D-Burlington, said he worries that if language of the bill is too vague, the intent will be misinterpreted and leave needy Vermonters in the lurch. He urged Haas to find goals that can be measured against benchmarks.

“The outcomes are so broad, I’m not sure they’re measuring what we intend to achieve,” Larson said. He pointed to a line in the bill: “The individual’s personal and economic independence will be promoted.” This idea of “promoting independence,” he argued, makes the agency’s obligation to help Vermonters in need seem optional.

“It’s almost like we’re saying, ‘We’ll try’,” Larson said.

He compared the relationship between lawmakers and agency officials to that of a buyer (the Legislature) and a seller (the Douglas administration). The Legislature, in his view, must be sure of what it’s buying before it cements the deal.

“If we have no say in how they achieve the outcomes, we’ve lost the process,” Larson said. “And the seller gets to tell us what we want to buy.”

A hot-button issue that came up as part of this discussion was a partnership between the University of Vermont and the Agency of Human Services and the Department of Education. The original language, which lawmakers cribbed from statute, mandated that the three entities work together to provide studies and recommendations for “improving the effectiveness of state and local health, human services and education programs.”

Until 2006, the research partnership produced a booklet that presented data about pregnant women, student success, family support, youth behaviors, the treatment of the elderly and people with physical and mental disabilities. The reports haven’t been produced since.

After negotiations with the administration, the Senate Appropriations Committee, according to Haas, insisted that the word “shall,” which would make the partnership mandatory, be replaced with the word “may.”

Larson said the research partnership, which had received a $50,000 grant from the state, was one of the Douglas administration’s targeted budget cuts.

Corrections

Rep. Terry Macaig, D-Williston, said the Judiciary committees built their outcomes on the Justice Reinvention Act, which calls for improvements in prison population management.

Under the draft legislation, offenders who are not a threat to public safety, and who have committed a technical violation of their probation or parole, would not be incarcerated.”

The “outcomes” Macaig outlined are based on significant changes in policy toward nonviolent offenders. Under the draft legislation, offenders who are not a threat to public safety, and who have committed a technical violation of their probation or parole, would not be incarcerated. New penalties would be developed to deter crime, Macaig said.

In this case, House Appropriations members said the language was too prescriptive. Rep. Alice Miller, D-Shaftsbury, said that teaching prisoners how to read, for example, might be a more effective way to help offenders get out of the cycle of crime than the community service programs listed in the draft bill.

“Why don’t you leave it up to the administration?” Miller asked. “You might find out teaching kids to read increases self-esteem” and might lead to better results.

Education

Rep. Linda Waite-Simpson, D-Essex Junction, and Sen. Randy Brock, R-Franklin-Grand Isle, from the House and Senate Education committees, respectively, got into a heated argument with the committee over one of the outcomes addressing money-saving strategies.

Under the “Challenges,” the Department of Education is obliged to reduce K-12 school spending by $11.33 million and $6 million in special education services.

Waite-Simpson and Brock framed the educational outcomes against the backdrop of school consolidation proposals under consideration by the Legislature, the State Board of Education and the Douglas administration.

The question Brock said, is not, at this point, whether school consolidation will happen, but how long it would take and what it would look like.

“We feel we’ll come up with something that will favor consolidation,” Brock said.

Waite-Simpson explained that the state Board of Education is forming a subcommittee to study options that would reduce the number of supervisory unions from about 60 to 13 or 20, based either on counties or technical center “catchment” areas. Brock said the Senate may pre-empt that process and come up with a bill that would move consolidation forward sooner.

The consolidation issue — which was listed in veiled terms as changes to school district governance structures in the last outcome in the draft bill —- sparked a heated debate.

An argument ensued about whether a budget-based outcome was appropriate given the Legislature’s charge to develop overarching goals for services, not quantitative goals, particularly since the money had already been removed from the fiscal year 2011 budget.

Brock argued that supervisory union consolidation is an essential part of the “Challenges” mandate.

“By changing the governance structure, you have the ability to use teachers in a building more efficiently,” Brock said.

Rep. Ann Manwaring, D-Wilmington, countered that while district consolidation is important, it could be addressed as a separate issue. “It doesn’t have to become the basis for this challenge process.”

Rep. Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, said that the bill’s assertion that restructuring should be conducted in the “most cost-efficient manner” feels, as she put it, “subjective.”

“The way No. 4 (the governance structures outcome) is worded, makes me uneasy,” Johnson said.

She suggested that the bill require schools to reduce administrative costs or bring management costs in line with the national average.

Waite-Simpson blasted the Public Strategies Group consultants for not providing enough guidance to the committee as they developed the outcomes.

“They had no clue how we do education in this state,” she said. “They have no understanding of our state and local partnership.”