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Friday, January 15, 2010
Committee Finds Efficient Options
By Martin Salazar
Journal Staff Writer
A committee formed by Gov. Bill Richardson to find ways to make state government more efficient in the face of state budget woes has found about $129 million in "low-hanging fruit" that could be cut.
But it also recommends the state study more sweeping changes that could reduce the number of employees on the state's payroll, reduce the number of colleges and universities and cut the number of school districts.
The Committee on Government Efficiency issued its report to the governor Thursday.
"These are solid recommendations that make a lot of sense as we look for new ways to reduce spending and cut bureaucracy," Richardson said in a statement. "I am ready to pursue many of these ideas immediately during the upcoming legislative session and by executive order."
The report's long-term recommendations are based on a study of the number of New Mexico state government employees per capita compared with states nearby — Arizona, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah. The study shows that New Mexico has 24.5 state employees per 1,000 people, the highest among those states and significantly higher than the U.S. average of 14.3.
New Mexico has slightly more than double the number of noninstructional higher education employees than the U.S. average — 7.3 per 1,000 compared with the national average of 3.6, according to the committee's report. Arizona has 2.8 employees per 1,000 in that category.
The committee speculated that the difference is because New Mexico has more higher educational institutions than Arizona.
New Mexico has six four-year universities and at least 18 two-year colleges. Arizona, with about triple New Mexico's population, has three public universities and about the same number of community colleges. A governor's task force in 2004 recommended reining in the proliferation of colleges and universities. Despite the recommendation, Northern New Mexico College in Española has been transitioning into a four-year school, and the University of New Mexico is launching a new campus in Rio Rancho.
"Governments tend to expand in both cost and programs in the 'good times' and rarely re-engineer the enterprise until financial exigencies require," the committee states in its report. "New Mexico is there!"
The committee recommends that the Governor's Office and Legislature spend the next six months studying the prospect of downsizing state government.
"It would seem imperative to better align our state-employee-per-thousand population to the levels of peer states," the committee report states.
But Carter Bundy, New Mexico political and legislative director for AFSCME, countered that the high number of state employees is due to New Mexico being a rural state.
"If you look at the list of states that have a (high) number of employees per capita, they're virtually all rural states," Bundy said. "It reflects the reality that we have a lot of people in a lot of different places to serve, and we don't get the benefits of economies of scale."
Bundy said New Mexico now has fewer classified state employees per capita than it did in 2002 at the end of Gary Johnson's eight years as governor.
The more immediate recommendations the committee made to deal with the deficit include consolidating departments, eliminating some boards and commissions and retooling the state's Medicaid system, which together could save about $129 million.
Among the recommended cost-saving measures:
n Merging the Public Education Department with the Higher Education Department; merging the Homeland Security Department into the Department of Public Safety; and merging various departments and agencies to create a Department of Commerce.
n Eliminating 19 boards and commissions, including the Water Cabinet, the Crime Stoppers Advisory Council and the Acequia Commission.
n Changing Medicaid benefits and the public school funding formula and streamlining higher education.
"We tried to think out of the box and tried to come up with ideas not only to promote savings but also to promote efficiency in government," said New Mexico Tech President Daniel Lopez, one of the committee members.
The committee was chaired by former Gov. Garrey Carruthers and other members are former Department of Finance and Administration secretary Willard Lewis; UNM Executive Vice President for Administration David Harris; Chris Krahling, a former architect of the government reorganization in the Jerry Apodaca administration; former Department of Finance and Administration budget director John Gasparich; and current DFA Secretary Katherine Miller.
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