BY RACHEL CHEESEMAN
SALEM- The Committee on Performance Excellence hopes to help the Oregon government do more with less. The committee was created by Senate Bill 1099, which passed with strong support from both sides of the aisle.
“We’re looking at the new normal, and the new normal is we expect to have less, certainly not more, revenue in the future,” said Sen. Frank Morse, R-Albany.
The committee is composed of seven members. Fred King, a public member, chairs the committee. The committee is composed of seven members: two union representatives, two legislators, two public members, a judicial representative and an executive representative.
Due to the current budget situation, the committee’s work is unfunded, and all members now serve as volunteers.
Morse drafted SB 1099. He and Rep. Chuck Riley, D-Hillsboro, serve as the legislative representatives.
King said the idea behind the committee was to “get Oregon performing at a very high level” in everything from leadership to performance to results while also maintaining a high level of transparency.
Morse said that working at this level and having some of these measures would help the state better prepare for financial crises like the current one by doing more with less money.
“There are pockets within government today where they’re looking at their processes and looking at lean management,” he said. “What we’re lacking is a comprehensive approach to it.”
Larry Williams, vice-chair of the committee and representative of the SEIU, the state employees union, said another goal of the committee was to change the legislative budget process from the current agency-by-agency approach to one that would focus on program areas, like teen pregnancy prevention, water cleanliness and others that have overlap in different agencies.
“Often, program areas cross over agency boundaries,” Williams said. “What we’d like to see is for the legislature to bring together everyone that’s in a program area, rather than piecemeal-ing it.”
The committee also hopes to see someone act as a Chief Performance Officer who would, in King’s words, work to ensure that the agencies are effectively and efficiently completing the tasks that have been assigned to them.
Other goals include developing recognition systems, organizing forums for agencies to share best practices and supporting and/or funding agencies’ training efforts.
Williams said that when budgets are tight, training programs are often some of the first to be cut, which can hurt agencies in the long run.
“You lose a lot in terms of providing service,” he said. “It’s not just about cost. It’s about providing meaningful service.”
These goals will have to be advanced primarily by the executive branch to prevent the legislature overstepping its power. Morse said he sees the work of the committee as providing a template for the executive branch to allow it to “pick up and seriously address the issue of performance excellence.”
“I think there’s plenty of opportunity to take resources within the governor’s office and redirect them,” Morse said. “Whoever is governor will have to make those decisions.”
