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Alabama NewsAlabama Politics
Living at the Expense of Everyone Else
By Gary Palmer
Posted on: February 28, 2005
In his book The Law, Frederic Bastiat wrote, "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
If Bastiat were alive today Alabama would be his case study.
The recent disclosure by the Birmingham News that the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR) has awarded millions of dollars in consulting contracts to former DHR employees and current employees' spouses once again reinforces the public's perception that some in state government are indeed living at the expense of the rest of us.
According to the News, DHR has spent more than $20 million just since 2003 on consultants who are being paid from $50 to $85 per hour. In addition, the federal government is reviewing DHR's failure to implement a new statewide child information computer system. After spending $60 million over the last 10 years to get the system in place, DHR has made little progress and the federal government wants to know why.
Call me cynical, but when state agencies are hiring so many former employees and the spouses of current employees as consultants and spending millions of dollars without getting much done, it looks suspiciously like a gravy train.
Unfortunately for Alabama taxpayers, DHR is not the only state agency that throws money down rat holes. State agencies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars awarding un-bid contracts to political cronies, defending lawsuits, handing out consulting contracts to friends and family, pursuing worthless projects, and paying for only the Lord knows what all else.
Poor planning and management is a huge accountability issue that Gov. Bob Riley is attempting to correct with the sensible budget that he has submitted to the State Legislature and in particular with his efforts to implement performance-based budgeting procedures for every state agency. Riley has developed a program called SMART budgeting that will force state agencies to base their budgets on clearly defined goals and measurable objectives.
The Alabama Legislature should make the SMART budget program state law; as it is, the program is only in effect for the rest of Gov. Riley's term. But Riley's efforts to implement real strategic planning and results-based management are not being well received by many members of the Legislature whose own self-interests will be affected. Unfortunately for Alabama taxpayers, the Legislature is a virtual den of politicians with conflicts of interest who are either themselves current or retired government employees or whose spouses are current or retired government employees.
By some estimates more than half of the current members of the State Legislature fall into this category, the vast majority of them tied to public education. This means that when these legislators vote on the Alabama Education Association-backed bill to give education employees and retirees a seven percent pay raise at a cost to Alabama taxpayers of over $190 million, many of these elected "representatives" will be direct beneficiaries.
Most Alabamians with even a lick of sense understand that state agencies should not be awarding high-paying consulting contracts to spouses of management-level state employees. Even if the work is needed and the person is competent to do it, it raises public suspicion of a conflict of interest and nepotism. And hopefully most Alabamians are beginning to realize that state legislators who work for or are retired from a government job, or have spouses in that category, are double-dipping the taxpayers and should not be in the State Legislature.
When the state spends tens of millions of dollars as is the case at DHR and still has nothing to show for it, it makes it extremely difficult to convince Alabama's taxpayers that the state needs more money. Worse yet, there are people in the state with real needs that are not being met because the state has wasted or misspent millions of dollars.
A recent report in Governing Magazine showed Alabama tied with California as the worst-managed state in the nation. The report quoted an unnamed source that nailed the problem we have with our state government and Legislature. The unnamed source said, "We have a lack of capacity to make good decisions here. The Legislature just brokers between opposing interests. And nobody is paying attention to minding the store, because there isn't any institutional capacity to do that."
The unnamed source could have gone a bit further and pointed out that many of the members of the Legislature are really brokering their own interests at the expense of the taxpayers. Making Riley's SMART budget program state law would help alleviate this, but it is doubtful this Legislature will pass a law that will stop the gravy train. At this point it appears that if Alabama taxpayers want to derail the gravy train and stop politicians and bureaucrats from living at their expense, they will have to do it in the next election.
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