For a greater understanding of this much-discussed “Challenges for Change” legislation passed by the House yesterday, consider the following objects (or perhaps concepts, or metaphors): the buckets, the silos, the function analysis, the Hail Mary pass.

The buckets were on the tables in the rooms where met the House “committees of jurisdiction,” which is Legislative jargon for the committees that deal with substantive stuff (natural resources, health care, education) as opposed to the functioning of government (appropriations, ways and means).

No, of course there were no actual buckets on the table. These were imaginary buckets, into which Legislative leaders urged committee members to place (imaginarily) the various proposals from the Douglas Administration. One bucket for the ideas the committee would accept, one for those it would reject, yet another for those in the “maybe” category.

Sure, it was a gimmick. But it seems to have worked. In a little more than two weeks, those committees went through the budget of almost every state agency, coordinated them with the “Challenge for Change” report from a consulting firm, and came up with a comprehensive bill designed to make state government work more efficiently, providing “more for less.”

Will it work? Nobody knows. It might not Even some lawmakers have their doubts, and worry that the end result will be little more than old-fashioned budget cuts which will reduce services for the poor, the sick, the elderly.

But “nobody knows” also means that the “Challenges” plan might work, at least to some extent. At any rate, what was evident in Montpelier yesterday – what has been evident there for the last two weeks – is that most legislators think it can work. Otherwise they wouldn’t have spent all that time and effort filling those “buckets.”

And fill them they did. The end result may be in doubt. The process was not. The lawmakers took their task seriously. They spent hours in long, boring discussions about “more effective delivery plans,” about “redesigning structure to improve outcomes,” about getting more people to file their income taxes electronically.

Perhaps because of the boredom,  reporters largely ignored the committee meetings. Maybe that’s why there seemed to be little posturing, political pontificating, or partisan wrangling. Speaker Shap Smith may have been self-serving when he said yesterday that the House had acted with “tri-partisan collaboration,” but he wasn’t inaccurate.

There were no actual silos in the Statehouse either. These are “funding silos,” and in a sense they are the problem the whole “Challenges for Change” project was designed to solve. Over the years, various programs – and the dollars to run them – have been put in different agencies even if the programs have the same goal.

Just to take one example, protecting the state’s water quality is handled by both the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets and the Agency of Natural Resources. Each has its own water quality “funding silo,” and while officials from the two departments co-operate, they don’t seemed to have eliminated duplication.

Legislators had hoped that the Administration, in making its proposals for implementing the “Challenge” bill, would try to combine or merge some of these “silos,” and at least some of the lawmakers were disappointed by the results.

“I had anticipated some creative responses,” said Sen. Virginia Lyons, the Williston Democrat who chairs the Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. “I haven’t seen that.”

Engineering her own creative response, Lyons invited Tanya Marshall of the Archives and Records Administration, a division of the Secretary of State’s Office, to appear before her committee Wednesday. Marshall has information relating to the silo situation, though she doesn’t use that term. She talks about function analysis.

“We take the whole, large, complex aspect of state government and break it down into simple components,” she said. “We track legislation, we track the agencies, we track the government functions over time and map them so we link the relationships.”

So, she said, if two agencies are duplicating each other’s efforts, “we’ll be able to understand how they’re connected and can help them achieve efficiencies.”

What Marshall’s office has is essentially a record of almost every function performed by most state agencies for years. A careful analysis of those records could, at least in theory, reveal where agencies were getting in each other’s way and replicating each other’s work.

Does that mean that instead of paying a consulting firm $286,000 for the “Challenges for Change” report, the Legislature and the Administration could have gotten the same results cheaper by calling Tanya Marshall?

Not really, she said, because some agencies don’t provide all their records; it’s voluntary on their part. But, she added, the analysis her office does often reveals “significant overlaps (in which) agencies working in their own environment don’t necessarily know where there are overlaps.”

Even though some subdivisions of the Agencies of Transportation and Nature Resources do not turn over all their records, Marshall said it was likely that there was some duplication in the process of approving permits for construction developments.

Whereupon we segue to the final metaphor – the Hail Mary pass.

As noted at the end of Wednesday’s post (scroll down) while most politicians talked about using the “Challenges” idea to “do more with less,” Gov. Jim Douglas wanted to use it to have the state government “do less with less.” He also had goals that went beyond the “Challenges” report, and he saw the report as a vehicle for accomplishing some of those goals.

So he attached part of his own agenda to the report.

No governor would do otherwise. Politicians (and everyone else) take opportunities when they see them, and Douglas saw the opportunity to accomplish two of his long-time goals: bringing down school spending and easing the permitting process for developers.

It was not only an opportunity; it was surely his last because he’s leaving office at the end of the year. With little to lose, he threw the long ball.

It was not a complete pass. His proposal to give the Education Department the power to consolidate the state’s 280 school districts to 50 or fewer went nowhere at all. His suggestion that most new construction projects be cleared under a “permit by rule,” which is essentially self-regulation, didn’t fare much better. The House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy did agree to allow that kind of permitting in two specific circumstances, and for one of them, even John Groveman of the Vermont Natural Resource Council said the consequences would be “benign.”

Groveman was less sanguine about the other one, allowing “permit by rule” for some projects in which industrial pollutants might endanger groundwater. But Rep. Tony Klein of East. Montpelier, the committee chairman with a strong environmental record, said the change was minor and posed no danger to water quality.

The changes, then, appear to be largely symbolic. But then so is the entire, seemingly unending squabble over “permit reform.” Sen. Lyons said she was “not sure there’s a permitting problem at all.”

There isn’t. It’s a tribal-psychological issue worth exploring another day.

In the matter of this “Challenges for Change” business, let’s first of all deal with the obvious question:

Is it an innovative, visionary concept that can truly “reinvent government,” enabling it to perform its necessary services at a lower price?

Or is it a fraud, a boondoggle in which almost $300,000 (yours) was spent to produce a document full of hackneyed prose designed to paper over an Executive Branch power-grab and the demolition of state services to the needy and helpless?

And here is the answer: Yes.

If that answer suggests that this is a complex subject, it suggests correctly. So complex that it will be examined here in two parts, today and Friday (for now; quite possibly there will be more next week).

The bi-polar quality of the “Challenges” dispute was summed up yesterday by a veteran statehouse operative who said, “the Democrats hate it because they think it gives the (Douglas) Administration too much power. The Republicans hate it because they think it doesn’t give the Administration enough power. If everybody hates it, maybe it’s a pretty good plan.”

Maybe. And maybe, like so many topics of partisan and ideological contention, it will end up neither doing as much good as its advocates claim nor as much harm as its opponents fear.

A little context: Though Democrats (and their non-governmental liberal constituencies) seem more opposed to the “Challenges” approach than the Republicans, the whole thing was mostly a Democratic idea. It was Democratic leaders of the Legislature who hired Public Strategies Group, the Minnesota-based consulting firm whose mission, according to its web site is to “transform government.”

PSG didn’t come on board until this year, but the idea, according to several lawmakers in both parties, was hatched last year, not long after the Democrats defeated Republican Gov. Jim Douglas in the Great Budget Battle of 2009. Last spring, ending weeks of rancorous partisan confrontation, the Legislature over-rode Douglas’s veto of the budget bill – something that had never before happened in Vermont – and imposed their own budget, which combined spending cuts with the tax increases Douglas bitterly opposed.

Even though they won, the Democratic leaders didn’t want a repeat performance this year. First, few people take pleasure in confrontation. Second, the Democrats couldn’t be certain they’d win again. Finally, they didn’t want to raise taxes again because (a) politicians rarely want to raise taxes; and (b) this is an election year, and one of the Legislative leaders, Sen. Peter Shumlin, is running for governor, portraying himself as a “fiscal conservative” who believes “Vermonters are taxed to the max.”

(Not all Democrats agree. Hold this thought for a few paragraphs).

Facing a $150 million deficit, the Legislature had to look into almost any plan to save money. This one, promising to allow the state to “do more with less”, seemed ideal to the Democrats. They could cut the budget without gutting state services. It seemed too good to be true.

As usual when anything seems too good to be true, it was.

The report says it will allow the Legislature to “deliver desired outcomes for $38 million less in general funds,” but it doesn’t really say how.

Or, to be both fairer and more precise, it sort of says how. At one point, for instance, it asserts that the Department of Liquor Control will produce “additional revenue for the general fund through increased sales” (partly through, “a gift card program generating $50,000 in new revenue the first year.”

Oh it will, will it?

As if it were a deity issuing  cosmic edicts, the “Challenges for Change” report declares that certain outcomes will be reached, asserting, for instance, that because of its recommendations, “Phosphorus in Lake Champlain is decreased.”

By magic? For the past decade or so the state has spent tens of millions of dollars to decrease phosphorous in Lake Champlain, which keeps increasing.

Or take the Administration’s  explanation of how it plans to save $1.3 million from the Reach Up (what used to be called welfare) program. At a meeting yesterday of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, an Administration official said the money would be saved by removing recipients from the welfare rolls because they’d get jobs. “because they’re entering employment.”

Sen. Doug Racine, the committee chairman, was not convinced. There is, he noted, a recession, and assuming that hundreds of Reach Up recipients would find jobs “seems counter-intuitive to me.”

Racine (refer here to the italicized sentence above) is one Democrat who is not enthusiastic about the “Challenges for Change” plans. He is also another Democrat who is running for governor, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out when the Senate takes up the Legislation, possibly next week. Racine might try to lead a fight against adopting the plan, hoping to paint Shumlin as too willing to compromise with Douglas.

Whatever else it ends up doing, the “Challenge” policy is all but certain to  reduce school spending, weaken– maybe a little, maybe not such a little – the social safety net, and tinker with environmental regulation. Opposing such outcomes is likely to appeal to Democratic primary voters.

But the “Challenges report also offered some realistic money-saving suggestions. In a way, hiring a consultant is like hiring an editor; it’s ‘another pair of eyes’ to look over your work. An outsider can more easily take a look at a process or procedure and point out another way to do it, perhaps a way to achieve the same ends for less money. “Doing more with less.”

It’s true that some of the suggestions are just plain common sense, raising the question of why they had not been thought of before. It needed a $286,000 consulting fee to figure out about booze gift certificates? But the whole idea of judging state services by their outcomes instead of by their inputs (time and people-hours) has some potential to save money without degrading the quality of the lives of those who need help.

Besides here’s the other part of the context: This is a done deal, or at least it is as done a deal as legislative bodies get. At a House Democratic caucus yesterday, there were plenty of complaints that the lawmakers “delegated our authority” on budget cuts to an Administration that “doesn’t share our values.”

But in February, both houses passed the bill adopting the general outlines – and the projected $38 million in savings –by huge margins, with only three House Republicans and one Senate Democrat in opposition.

In doing so, the lawmakers “booked” that $38 million. The “savings” (such as they are) are in the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. If the Legislature doesn’t adopt the “Challenges” bill, it will have to find the $38 million some other way because there’s still that $150 million deficit.

Except that actually it’s more like a $160 million deficit. Oh, and the “Challenges” bill won’t save $38 million this coming Fiscal Year. It will save more like $20 million.  The rest will be saved by…well, that’s not certain, but here’s a good bet. It will be saved by doing less with less.

Which is just fine with some folks.  On the January day when the “Challenges” plan was unveiled, the consultants from Minnesota came visiting, and Douglas and the Democrats presented a united front of collegiality and good cheer, that “do more with less” phrase was mouthed over and over.

But toward the end of the afternoon, after a small ceremony in the Governor’s ceremonial office, one man responded by saying, “I don’t want to do more with less. I want to do less with less.”

He said it quietly, and he was standing along one side of the room, with no one right next to him, so it’s possible no one paid him any mind.

A bit strange, when you think about it, because the person who said that was, as it happens, none other than James H. Douglas. He had plans.

FIRST, A POLITICAL BULLETIN: Paul Beaudry, the conservative radio talk show host on WDEV in Waterbury, has resigned from True North Radio and is preparing to run for Congress.

“I have given my two weeks notice,” after four years hosting the call-in show, Beaudry said in a telephone interview Sunday evening. Though he said there was still some chance he would decide against running, he described himself as “super-strongly considering it, and doing all the things necessary” to prepare.

That included, he said, laying the groundwork for raising money and hiring staff for a campaign to defeat Rep. Peter Welch, the heavily favored Democrat who will seek a third term in November.

First, Beaudry would have to win a primary against Keith Stern of Springfield, but even Stern’s campaign manager conceded that Beaudry might be the favorite.

“Because Paul is well known he’s going to have some financial support we don’t have,” said Andrew Glover, “and unfortunately money wins the election.”

To counter Beaudry’s name-recognition and financial advantage, Glover said, the Stern campaign would argue that Beaudry is too “ultra-conservative” to have any chance against Welch.

“Keith can get the swing voters, Glover said. “Paul can’t.”

Beaudry, who is 47 and lives in Swanton would almost certainly be the most conservative Republican statewide candidate in years. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t win the primary. In Vermont, as elsewhere in the Northeast, moderates have drifted away from the Republican fold, some affiliating with the Democrats, others redefining themselves as independents. As a result, a larger proportion of the GOP primary electorate is well to the right of center.

Beaudry said he would run as a “staunch conservative” to balance Vermont’s “bunch of liberals down there” who only want to “spend and spend and spend.”

Beaudry has been a firm supporter of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. He has also devoted several programs to attacking the proposed Wild and Scenic designation of parts of the Missisquoi and all of the Trout River, calling it a “big government land grab.”

The radio program will apparently go on with another host. Beaudry said the owners of True North Radio, whom he would not identify, were already working with a potential substitute for him on the program. Ken Squier, the President and CEO of WDEV, who said he heard of Beaudry’s plans just the other day, also said the program would continue Like some other shows on WDEV, the station itself does not produce True North Radio, but simply sells it air time.

NEXT, A BIT OF PEDANTRY: On Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition last week, Ken Page, the executive director the Vermont Principals’ Association, had some incisive comments about the school and school financing situation.

He also said – not once, not twice, but thrice – that there were “less students” in Vermont public schools these days.

Okay, we all know what he meant: there aren’t as many students as there were a few years ago. But it’s reasonable to expect a senior educator say what he means in proper English. Otherwise, why expect the kids to use proper English?

There are fewer students than there used to be.

That’s not hard, is it?

And it isn’t just pedantry, either. There are no doubt several reasons why English-speaking men and women have made contributions disproportionate to their numbers in science and literature. But surely one of them is the language itself. Its vast and ever-expanding vocabulary gives English-speakers the power to express themselves with more precision and nuance than perhaps any other language.

Maintaining the distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ is important because maintaining distinctions keeps one in the habit of…maintaining distinctions. And that’s key to precision and nuance.

FINALLY, AN UPDATE: For those who may not have noticed, Gov. Jim Douglas did what the News Guy predicted he would do (see Broken Date, March 26)  and did not veto the bill moving the date of this year’s primary from September 14 to August 24.

No, he didn’t sign the bill http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/2010/bills/Passed/S-117.pdf (S. 117), either. He just announced last week that he would let it become law without his signature. That way he gets to express his displeasure with the new law without doing anything to stop it.

Doing anything to stop a bill that had overwhelming support of the Democratic majorities in both houses might have upset “the general collegiality of the (Legislative) session so far,” the Governor said.

He  didn’t say, but probably knew, that refusing to move the date could put the state out of compliance with federal law, risking a voting rights suit from the U.S. Department of Justice and other messy complications.

He did repeat his earlier contention that turnout would probably be lower in August, and that it was not “in the best interest of our representative democracy to have a summer primary.”

He’s right, even if September 14 is still in the summer, scientifically speaking; the autumnal equinox doesn’t occur until September 22 at 11:09 PM. But socially speaking summer ends on Labor Day, September 6 this year. Before then, lots of people are still away on vacation, and even though absentee voting isn’t that complicated, the turnout for an August primary is likely to be dismal.

So why was there no discussion about moving future primaries (too late for this year) to the spring? A majority of states have their primaries before mid-June, when the summer gets under way. Another six states vote earlier in August, and three other states – Alaska, Arizona, and Florida – will be voting the same day as Vermont. The old argument against spring primaries was that they made the election campaigns too long. But these days the campaigns are long anyway.  May or early June is a convenient time for the voting public and would give the winning candidates enough time to organize their general election campaigns.