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.

Five or so years ago, as Rep. Bill Frank, an Underhill Democrat, remembers it, he helped guide a bill through the Legislature setting up a computerized prescription drug data base to prevent people from getting prescriptions for the same drug from two or three different doctors, either to sell the surplus or to over-medicate themselves.

It worked. Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration set up that data base after only, as Frank remembers it, three and a half years.

“Sometimes you just have keep track,” Frank said Every January I would have the person who was in charge of setting up the system come into our (House) committee (on Human Services). Just sort of on my own.”

It wasn’t, Frank said, that he and his fellow lawmakers were being stonewalled.

“Whenever I called the commissioner they were very responsive,” he said. ”I’d get answers. But I sometimes wondered: Is this the role of legislators? To follow whether the laws are implemented?”

Maybe it is.

If so, the Vermont Legislature works under certain disadvantages. It is, as Frank noted, “a citizen legislature,” which, he said “works great, but basically we can’t do oversight only for three or four months a year when the legislature is in session.”

Whether or not it “works great,” another way to describe a “citizen legislature” is “amateur legislature.” The $625.36 a week salary (only when the Legislature is in session) is one of the lowest in the country. Even the leaders, who get extra pay, have day jobs. House Speaker Shap Smith works at a law firm. Senate President Peter Shumlin operates a business in Putney.

Individual legislators don’t have staff, either, as they do in most states. There is a Legislative Council’s office, with a staff of 35 (that’s not just professionals; that includes support staff), and the 13-person Joint Fiscal Office. A few aides work for the leaders and some committees, but according to Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst at the National Council of State Legislators, “Vermont has one of the smallest, if not the smallest, staff of any legislature.”

The Governor may work just down the hall from the legislative chambers. But his is a real job, paying a tad more than $150,000 a year, the tenth highest of the 50 governors. He appoints six agency secretaries, each of whom also earns more than $100,000 a year, and the heads of 21 commissions and six boards. Every one of them is fully staffed. Almost every one has a public relations spokesperson and one worker who, whatever his or her job description, lobbies the Legislature.

Not that the governor’s administration (not capitalized here because it would apply to any governor of either party) is the Legislature’s only source of information. Lobbyists for all sorts of business and causes assail lawmakers with facts (or alleged facts) and analysis almost every day, and the legislative staff regularly runs the numbers on tax and spending proposals.

Still, there is no doubt about which branch of government outweighs the other when it comes to making its case to the press, the public, the entire political process.

As in most states, the Vermont Legislature gets most of its information about the executive branch from the executive branch. Up to a point, lawmakers seem satisfied with the cooperation they get.

“I have had no trouble with having commissioners or agency secretaries come before my committee,” said Ann Pugh, the South Burlington Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Social Services. If she summons lower-level officials, she said, they appear, too, but they “usually come with their boss. I understand the position they are in. They represent the governor.”

But like many legislators, Pugh said she sometimes thinks administration officials hold back information.

“When the initial personnel cuts being discussed in 2007 I was told, we won’t know until June 30 who we’re going to lay off July 1,” she said. I kept asking them about what would be the impact in terms of the service the state could provide.”

She said she never got a satisfactory answer.

As explained in Friday’s post (just scroll down), Vermont legislators might have a harder time getting information from the executive branch because the state is one of the few in which legislative committees do not have the power to issue subpoenas.

“We can’t question people under oath, either,” said Rep. Tony Klein, the East Montpelier Democrat who chairs the Hose Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. “For most part it hasn’t been necessary, but there have been times, I won’t tell you somebody lied, but they certainly didn’t give the full picture.”

Like other Democrats, Klein said Douglas runs “a very controlling administration,” including restrictions on allowing some state officials to appear before a legislative committee unless their supervisor was also present.

Both Klein and House Majority Leader Floyd Nease of Johnson said that the Douglas Administration has more public relations aides than any previous administration, and sometimes sent them, rather than officials actually responsible for the functions of government, to appear before legislative committees. The administration, both Democrats said, was more intent on “staying on message” than sharing information.

That the Douglas administration has more flacks than its predecessors is not debatable, having been documented by Shay Totten in Seven Days. But just as Douglas employs more PR people than Dean, it is likely that Dean employed more than Richard Snelling before him, who had more than Madeleine Kunin before him, who had…

All administrations, state and federal, Democratic and Republican, want their officials to stay “on message.” If earlier Vermont administrations were less vigorous in enforcing that rule, it was probably because until recently both the governor and the legislative majorities were Republican, and because in the pre-television era, “message” could be controlled informally and in person.

No longer. Not just TV, but direct mail, push polling and ideological blogging have come to Vermont. The modern spin era is here, and will not disappear if the next governor is a Democrat. Unless the Legislature asserts itself, he or she is likely to be as secretive and uncooperative as the incumbent.

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