State Strategies to Manage Budget Shortfalls

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Case Study: The Maine Productivity Realization Task Force

Maine Governor Angus S. King Jr. appointed the Productivity Realization Task Force in February 1995 to recommend ways to save money through enhancing productivity and reducing the number of state employees. The 13-member task force included legislators, state administrators and business people from the state. The recommendations it developed over a period of 10 months should produce $45 million in net general fund savings in the 1996-97 biennium. Another $14.4 million in biennial savings will be reinvested in technology and program improvements. Savings for the single fiscal year 1997 will amount to about 1.6 percent of the general fund budget.

Savings will result from the elimination of 1,352 state positions (more than 10 percent of the total state workforce of 13,205). Two-thirds of the positions became vacant as the result of a hiring freeze and 476 people were laid off. Agency reorganization and internal agency consolidation allowed for elimination of 14 percent of the managerial and supervisory positions in state government and accounted for 20 percent of all positions eliminated. This was made possible by encouraging agencies to shift from a rigid program structure to functional groupings that encourage team activities, through upgraded technology and through new approaches to administration and management.

In keeping with a new focus on function rather than program, the department of Conservation merged its Bureau of Parks and its Bureau of Public Lands into a Bureau of Parks and Land. The State Planning Office abandoned a vertical agency organization in favor of cross-functional teams focused on functions mandated in law. The departments of Human Services and Transportation consolidated and centralized offices and activities.

The focus on technology gave agencies resources to modernize computer systems, management information systems and telephone systems to reduce the need for personnel and increase service capacity, for example, with voice mail. Toll-free lines and voice-response systems can provide responses to routine questions from Human Services clients. Document imaging will replace typing documents into computer files. Various law enforcement agencies have automated and coordinated their licensing and inspection functions.

A further innovation is grouping state agencies with shared personnel, financial and other administrative services to replace agency-by-agency duplication. Groupings are on functional bases. For example, the departments of Agriculture, Conservation and Environmental Protection have been grouped as one "cluster" to share administrative services. Another cluster will be the departments of Defense & Veterans' Affairs and Public Safety. Social services agencies make up another cluster.

Finally, agencies consolidated or combined internal activities to do away with separate administrative structures.

The state created a special Support and Outplacement Services Team to assist people who lost their jobs and to coordinate services for them from their own and other state agencies. The governor (with whom the legislature worked closely throughout the process) summarizes the result as "a government that is optimally productive, effective, accountable, affordable and responsive." {State of Maine, Productivity Realization Task Force, Summary Report: Enhancing Productivity in Maine State Government (Augusta, Maine: June 1996).

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Written December 1996, posted January 2003, reviewed December 2003
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