BETTER BUDGET NUMBERS

The two major complaints about Gov. John Baldacci’s $38 million in spending reductions are that the cuts are too deep in social services while too few government jobs were cut. It may be possible to address both concerns by looking not only at total state spending but also assessing how many people the state employs to provide services. In addition to listing state spending per department or program, budget documents could include employment numbers and trends. This will help the public see if the state is, as the saying goes, doing more with less.

Once this has been done for state government – including the university and community college systems – the same analysis can be asked of dozens of agencies that provide services funded by the state.

Earlier this week, Gov. Baldacci announced he was curtailing funding to dozens of programs and services to fill a $38 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. His order means that programs ranging from family mediation and mental health counseling to state park lifeguards and department travel budgets will be reduced or eliminated. The largest cuts are in the departments of education and health and human services as they make up the largest shares of state spending.

To assess whether these cuts or others are the best way to curb state spending, lawmakers and the public need to better understand where the money goes. Comparing current state spending to years past is one assessment. Quantifying state employment could be a clearer one.

Since Gov. Baldacci took office in 2003, the state work force has been reduced by 778 people, according to the Department of Administrative and Financial Services. Figures such as these need more context.

What lawmakers and the public should want to know is whether departments are providing more or fewer services with more or fewer employees. For example, if a department has added several employees in recent years, are these people completing more tasks? If not, could some of those positions be eliminated?

Such an analysis would highlight departments that are doing more with fewer employees, fulfilling the governor’s overused “tightening our belts” mantra. It could also address persistent complaints that the state employment has grown while the services the state provides are cut back.

The governor did not include the state’s public higher education institutions in his cutback order, instead asking them to come up with internal cuts and using that money to support scholarships or other means to mitigate tuition increases. The schools must do this review with at least as much rigor as Chancellor Terrence MacTaggart applied to his cost cutting at the University of Maine System office, which cut more than 10 percent.

Finally, social service agencies are rightly concerned that the mentally ill, foster children and the elderly will be harmed by the cuts. But, they too, must assess whether they are operating as efficiently as possible. Using the same comparison of employment to services provided, beginning with the largest providers, will enable them and elected officials to better answer this question.

In the coming budget debates, many numbers will be bandied about. Adding a simple assessment of state employment trends could help clarify that debate.