“Nevada’s state government is fundamentally broken. It is a patchwork of inefficiencies, leftover bureaucracy and duplicative services. It is an organization designed for the 19th century that has inched forward with shortsighted fixes and no long-term planning.” – from Moving Nevada Forward, Rory Reid‘s plan to fix Nevada’s budget
There are some fine ideas in Rory Reid’s plan to balance the state budget without raising taxes.
For example, Reid proposes merging and consolidating a number of state agencies, enabling the state to eliminate duplicate management. (The DMV, for example, would be merged into the Department of Transportation. We’d still need the same number of DMV workers, lest the lines lengthen and the public temper shorten, but management could be consolidated.)
Another good idea would be to focus the state corrections system on violent offenders, and direct non-violent offenders to less expensive forms of punishment and rehabilitation.
Creating a Sunset Commission to examine every state agency and recommend cuts or changes every 10 years is a good idea, too.
Leveraging the state’s buying power to purchase medicine to buy drugs for the state’s prisons, SeniorRx, state school student health centers and state employees will save millions, Reid predicts.
Going after federal funds for programs the state is already running is — with due respect to Reid — a no-brainer. Why the state isn’t already doing this is an appalling mystery.
There’s also no reason the state can’t replace paper checks with e-payments, saving on postage, paper and printing. (Anybody with direct deposit knows about that.) And if the Apple Store can send me an e-mail receipt for my iPhone charger, there’s no reason the state can’t do the same, with a whole bunch of correspondence. All of that saves money.
But there are some bad ideas in Reid’s plan, too.
For example, state workers who have had their pay cut (via furlough days) and raises curtailed will continue to suffer “…until our state’s economy is back on track and revenues are sufficient to justify ending furloughs and reinstating pay increases for state employees.” That may go over well with the public, but it won’t with state employees, whose hard work and loyalty is ignored by the Reid plan.
Privatizing inmate medical care and mental health care is a prescription for disaster, and an idea that’s been rejected before. The projected $9 million savings just aren’t worth the risk of putting people that society already doesn’t care about in the hands of people motivated primarily by the bottom line.
But by far, the largest failure of a plan that seeks to evolve Nevada’s “19th century government” into a modern model is the failure to even consider changes to the state’s 19th century tax structure. While almost every state in the nation has a tax of some kind on business income, Nevada does not. Yet, even states with such a tax (think Texas, for example) are thriving while Nevada’s tourism-dependent economy is sputtering. Any serious plan to fix Nevada’s government needs to address that, and Reid’s plan fails most spectacularly on that point.
In fact, the plan doesn’t address taxes at all, an odd omission considering that every single current legislative leader — Republican and Democrat, Northern and Southern and rural — has said that new taxes will be needed to balance the budget. By Reid’s own admission, and assuming that his projections are 100 percent correct (a generous assumption in some cases), his budget balancing plan is still short by more than $500 million when it comes to the next biennium’s $3 billion deficit.
The bottom line: Reid has some good ideas that should be implemented no matter who wins the election in November. But the plan fails to address the single worst feature of Nevada’s current government tax structure, and that failure of leadership may well lead everybody else to simply patch up the state’s budget with one-time, short-term quick fixes to get through another two years of economic misery. In that respect, this plan will only inch us forward with shortsighted fixes and no long-term planning.
Tags: Rory Reid
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Steve,
Once again your observations and conclusions ring true with me.
I read the Reid plan but wasn’t impressed with his higher-ed plan at all. Where will funding to drive higher-ed come from in the short term (1-7 years)?! Sounds like he wants to push more money into the all-but-dead Harry Reid Science and Technology Park or the Patty Wade park in Northern Nevada where John Ensign earlier provided an earmark for an off-ramp.
Reid starts a dialogue, but many blanks need to filled in.
I read where an EDAWN leader has been seeking “diversification” of the economy for years, however last year they brought “only” six companies into the Reno area. Their three prong plan to expand diversification is to bring CA firms here, help them get government subsidies and some other banal BS.
Seriously, it is time to get the business community, the economic development people, the lawmakers and education officials in one room and not let them out till they create a homogeneous strategic plan to move Nevada forward and to identify funding to execute same. Or, just agree to go back to the Nevada lifestyle of the mid 1980′s.