Time To Boot Up Or Be Booted Out

In business, if a product doesn’t work or a service doesn’t satisfy, customers turn away and the business must improve or die. In government, if a program doesn’t work or a service doesn’t satisfy, it must need a bigger budget.

Consider, for example, the state of Washington’s attempts to computerize its record-keeping for welfare clients, unemployment benefits and the licensing of motor vehicles and drivers. These should have been simple chores. It is routine, in other realms, for computer database searches to pluck needles from massive haystacks with lightning speed.

But state government has worked for 14 years to computerize its welfare records and the system might be up and running by June - $54 million later, a price tag five times the original estimate. Similar woes plague computerization in the licensing and unemployment departments.

If computer projects took this long to complete in the private sector, Bill Gates would be a vagrant, selling pencils to pedestrians.

Justifiably indignant, House Speaker Clyde Ballard says he’ll convene hearings early this year to find out how these boondoggles could occur and how the waste can be stopped.

Being a veteran of the legislative process, Ballard is well aware that he is up against the oldest game in Olympia: It’s the citizen Legislature versus the entrenched bureaucracy. The party of taxpayers versus the party of government. Every January a crew of idealistic reformers roll into Olympia for weeks of hearings, meetings, negotiations and votes. Every spring, the legislators stagger wearily out of town, leaving behind a slightly modified and usually bigger state bureaucracy, carrying like trophies a few bits of legislation that they hope will solve the problems their hearings uncovered. Every year the cycle repeats - but the issues change. The programs created in previous years become forgotten lines in a perpetually growing budget. Rarely do programs end. Rarely does the Legislature determine whether they work - and if it tries, program employees can blur and exaggerate the data to preserve their jobs.

Ballard is in a position to break the cycle. His party, the reform-minded Republicans, dominates both houses of the Legislature. He can make a priority of scrutinizing programs for effectiveness. Lawmakers can attach sunset clauses and performance yardsticks so their creations will die unless they work. Specialized legislative task forces could form, to hold agencies accountable.

Other state governments are becoming laboratories of innovation. But a laboratory must monitor the results of its experiments, and cancel those that fail.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board