Executive Branch Review

Mary Beth Schneider, writing for the Indy Star, has an article on a performance review of the executive branch. The Governor says that, even though his department’s didn’t reach the benchmarks he set for them, it’s o.k., because they’re making progress. He says they started in a deep hole and the goals were set very, very high.  One area where he wants to see improvement is the BMV which has an average transaction time for motorists of 42 minutes, far from the 20-minute target. Apparently the BMV backslid in February with a decline in both customer service and waiting times. (Apparently BMV bad-boy, Joel Silverman, needs to come up with something beyond  removing clocks from the branches, aligning chairs so they face each other, instituting uniforms and putting real-time spy cameras on employees.)

Daniels claims to have saved the state $250 million (or maybe that was one of the benchmarks that wasn’t quite met — I had trouble parsing that paragraph.) But some of the savings has come from privatizing government services using foreign contractors. Even the so-called Indiana companies are only Hoosiers by virtue of funny definitions.

The report states that at the end of 2005, Indiana purchased 74 percent of its goods and services from “Hoosier companies.”

But one of the companies it calls an Indiana firm is Aramark, which is headquartered in Philadelphia. That firm won the $112 million contract to provide food services for the Department of Correction. Several Indiana companies, including the not-for-profit Bosma Industries for the Blind, have said they lost state business as a result.

The report says Aramark is an Indiana firm “based on its employment of over 3,500 Hoosiers” and the Indiana taxes it pays.

The
report also calls General Revenue Corp., which won the $7.5 million
contract to run the Department of Revenue’s tax amnesty program, an Indiana firm. The company, however, is headquartered in Cincinnati.

 So, the company may pay taxes in Indiana (or it may not, depending how good its accountants are) and it may pay its employees subpar wages with no benefits and, if it does, then it’s defined as an “Indiana company” even if all of its profits are sucked out of Indiana and invested elsewhere or put in the pockets of non-resident executives (until a portion of the profits make their way back to the Mitch Daniels campaign fund).

To everyone’s surprise, Democrats were critical of the Daniels administration.

They questioned the mostly good marks given the Indiana Economic Development Corp., a public-private partnership which, according to the report, secured commitments in 2005 “to create more than 18,000 new jobs and retain over 47,000 jobs.”

House Minority Leader B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, pointed to different statistics that show Indiana has fallen in job growth and personal income compared to other states.

Daniels is “ignoring the needs of the people of Indiana,” Bauer said, criticizing the governor for closing license branches, enacting daylight-saving time and leasing the Indiana Toll Road.