SENATE Bill 2213 is worth a close look by all of us. It is the privatization bill that has the support of Gary Rodrigues, leader of the United Public Workers union. It also is the bill to implement the recommendations of the Governor's Economic Revitalization Task Force, of which Rodrigues is a member. It has less than 1,000 words. Privatization bill
requires scrutinyIts preface says that Hawaii is "now forced to compete in a global economy with competitors ranging from Bangladesh to Chile to Germany." In other words, things aren't what they used to be.
It sees great pressures on Hawaii's businesses and employees "to be very efficient and to offer ever-increasing value to the purchasers of their goods and services." Included under that mandate, it says, must be "Hawaii's economic support system of infrastructure, regulation and government services."
The bill would create two governor-appointed committees of seven members each. The first committee would include three key state cabinet members and four private sector persons "skilled in the areas of budgeting, accounting or the management of large corporations."
It would work to make state budgeting processes much more transparent and accountable. By next January it would select three state departments to model implementation and be monitored over the next two years.
The second committee would develop "a managed process" to promote public-private sector competition for government services. It would include three designated cabinet members plus representatives of the affected public employee bargaining units.
Rodrigues, one of Hawaii's strongest and most effective labor leaders, already has short-circuited a lot of county privatization efforts. Yet he keeps insisting he is not opposed to privatization when it brings true savings to the public rather than just enriching some greedy contractor.
Governor Cayetano has bolstered him by saying government should have no interest in simply replacing government workers with the equivalent of sweat shop labor.
Both committees would operate under a charge "to ensure that civil service laws and merit principles are not violated." Does this over-protect state and county employees and their tremendous fringe benefits to the point that no real progress can be made?Or could there be some give somewhere? I hope this point gets full amplification in the upcoming Senate and House hearings.
My sense is that S.B. 2213 could be either a go-ahead or a roadblock for privatization depending on the intentions of those involved.
One "we can hardly lose" part of it is the charge to Committee No. 1 to show how to make government costs much clearer to everyone involved. Object: Better allocation of our limited resources. Today, for example, many retirement and fringe benefit charges are accounted for entirely separately from departmental budgets. Charging these costs and projecting them forward for future years department-by-department would bring much more understanding of the real costs of government services.
Equally desirable is the mandate to measure outputs rather than inputs, to try to let us know what are the visible results of departmental work, rather than just telling us how many people are on the payroll. In education this might help us focus on getting more teachers into classrooms by reducing positions in administration.
I may have been rash to say that "we can hardly lose" on some of the recommendations. Bureaucracy and politics are so vexing that the ways to lose vastly outnumber the ways to win. Frustrating something is much easier than accomplishing something.
There's a maxim that change doesn't really become possible until the present becomes intolerable. Are we hurting enough to really move forward on these good ideas with good intent? Based on the hammering and ditching of other proposals from the Economic Revitalization Task Force, I have my doubts.