General

Zero Based Budgeting: Blackwell’s Doing?

The Enquirer - Ohio may go to zero-base as budget control

Some Key paragraphs:

House Speaker Jon Husted, a Kettering Republican, said the
zero-based budgeting language is part of a compromise with GOP
gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell.

Legislative leaders
agreed last week to put spending limits in state law in exchange for
Blackwell pulling his government-limiting constitutional amendment off
November’s ballot.

Husted makes it sound like the legislative TEL was only part of what Blackwell got in return.  He may be a tougher negotiater than we thought.  But wait…

But Scott Borgemenke, Husted’s chief of staff, said requiring
agencies to start at zero when planning each fiscal year wasn’t a
demand of Blackwell’s.

“I don’t think it was necessary. I just
think it was desired,” he said. “It’s been a will of the Republican
legislature for a while, it (the state tobacco budget) was a vehicle in
which to do it, so we are doing it.

Oh it wasn’t a demand, it was a wish, and only now did we decide to do it.  Sure.  Whatever!  Blackwell is an even better negotiator than I thought, he merely expresses a desire and the legislature is bending over backwards to do it!  Sure didn’t happen when Taft was the big guy (yes the era of Taft is over, unofficially).

The legal change needed to allow Citizens for Tax Reform, the
committee behind Blackwell’s spending limitations, to pull the ballot
issue is scheduled to be inserted in a separate elections bill today.
That provision was a second piece for the deal.

Jon Allison,
chief of staff to Gov. Bob Taft, said the governor was still awaiting a
letter Monday that he has demanded from the committee, providing
assurances it will pull the issue after the compromise is struck with
the Legislature. Until then, the governor isn’t making any promises
he’ll support the bill.

Sounds to me like a letter is expected, and that Taft will fall in line when he gets his assurance.  And I think that he will.  Too many GOP necks are on the line in this deal and although Taft’s public career is over, he should be persuadable to not burn this bridge.

Required reading to be able to blog intelligently about Zero Based Budgeting (I’ve given these only a cursory read):

Wikipedia Entry

Zero-Based Budgeting is a new technique of planning and
decision-making. It reverses the working process of traditional
budgeting. In traditional budgeting, departmental managers need to
justify only increases over the previous year budget. This means what
has been already spent is automatically sanctioned. In case of ZBB, no
reference is made to the previous level of expenditure. Every
department function is reviewed comprehensively and all expenditures
rather than only increases are approved. ZBB is a technique, by which
the budget request has to be justified in complete detail by each
division manager starting from the Zero-base. The Zero-base is
indifferent to whether the total budget is increasing or decreasing.

The Mackinac Center seems to have a good reality based view of what it can and can’t do.

Texas

Idaho: Idaho State Legislature

Florida: Florida Monitor

Idaho: Idaho State Legislature

Good History here, plus a great summary of what is actually involved if you do it the way it was supposed to be done.  To me this seems to be the most important part relating to keeping government costs reasonable:

The ranking process is used to establish a rank priority of decision
packages within the organization. During the ranking process managers and their staff will
analyze each of the several decision package alternatives. The analysis allows the manager
to select the one alternative that has the greatest potential for achieving the
objectives of the decision package. Ranking is a way of evaluating all decision packages
in relation to each other. Since, there are any number of ways to rank decision packages
managers will no doubt employ various methods of ranking. The main point is that the
ranking of decision packages is an important process of ZBB.

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