Legal Barriers Thwart Efforts To Improve State Government Efficiency

Where a new need for services which have been customarily and historically provided by civil servants arises, and where there is no showing that civil servants could not provide those services, a (private) contract for such services is unauthorized.

This is so regardless of the cost savings which might be made through such a contract.

So ruled the Washington Supreme Court 17 years ago in a suit brought by public employees against Spokane Community College. The decision has produced compelling - and severely troubling - cost consequences for Washington taxpayers, businesses and government.

The very next year, lawmakers went even further to institute and ensure empire building by public agencies. They amended state law so no contract “may be executed or renewed if it would have the effect of terminating classified employees or classified employee positions existing at the time of the execution or renewal of the contract.”

And ever since, efforts have been stymied to make the government workplace in this state competitive with the private sector.

Inefficiency in this state’s government is protected by law. It is protected by law, even though there is no longer any question that wise use of free-market competition to deliver public services appreciably cuts costs.

“It is a proven success,” proclaims Elaine Ramel Davis in the introduction to a new how-to manual on privatizing state government. “And (it) has taken its place in the mainstream of national public policy.

“But its journey has not been an easy one, particularly in Washington state.”

And that goes double in Spokane, birthplace of public employee protectionism.

Davis, arguably the Northwest’s foremost authority on privatization, is a senior fellow of the prestigious Washington Institute for Policy Studies.

The institute is a non-partisan Seattle-based think tank. The manual, with the catchy title of “Designing a Comprehensive State-Level Privatization Program, How-To Guide No. 1,” was drafted by William D. Eggers, director of the Privatization Center of the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based national research organization.

Davis puts her spin on the 30-page technical tract in a lengthy forward. “In 1992,” she writes, “new Democrats, influenced by the popularity of entrepreneurial government themes proposed in David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s ‘Reinventing Government,’ rushed to embrace long-cherished conservative concepts of free-market approaches to government.”

“Osborne and Gaebler’s text was liberally cited by the new Democrats as examples of how they would reform the nation and lead us into the 21st Century.”

And on the strength of that rhetoric, Democrats made a clean sweep in the elections three years ago, Davis points out. They took control of Congress, the presidency, and in this state the Legislature and the governorship.

“But Washington state government in 1995 is not much further along in unleashing the power of the marketplace,” laments Davis, “than it was in 1992.”

Regrettably, what she says is absolute fact.

Angry voters revolted last year, turning over control of both houses of Congress and the Washington Legislature to Republicans.

In Olympia, the House passed a measure that Davis says “explicitly encouraged” state agencies to cost efficiency “through the use of competition in the purchase or delivery of services…”

Davis says the bill would have turned “the Supreme Court ruling on its ear and overturned subsequent legislation that has constrained management efficiencies for almost two decades.”

It would have set up a task force to pursue competitive strategies. It would have provided for monitoring and reporting on progress.

But neither this pivotal measure, nor a watered-down Senate version, were to be.

“None of this legislation survived,” says Davis. “While the current legislative environment has improved, legal barriers to cost-effective government and the high price of public employee protectionism remain in place.”

The law isn’t binding on local government, says Davis. But “city and county governments in Washington have chosen, in many cases, to maintain in-house operations in lieu of outside or private contracting for fear of legal action by public employee groups.”

This is largely the case in Spokane, even though a new poll by Community Partners, a citizens group established to advise City Hall, shows two out of three residents endorse privatization. Unfortunately, two out of three city employees are opposed. The battle lines are drawn.

, DataTimes MEMO: Associate Editor Frank Bartel’s column appears on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Frank Bartel The Spokesman-Review