Occasional Blue Oregon blogger and freelance politics writer T.A.Barnhart managed to get along to gubernatorial candidate John Kitzhaber‘s “jobs strategy roll out” yesterday, and since we were busy putting together the paper here, I was interested in what he had to write about the experience and thought you might be, too:
By T.A.Barnhart
Once and (possible) future governor John Kitzhaber began the process of rolling-out strategy papers yesterday. The strategy title was bare-bones simplicity: Jobs for Today. Jobs for Tomorrow. But more interesting than the jobs and economic strategy themselves was the two-part mea culpa that accompanied his presentation: I used to do this all wrong, and I didn’t do a good enough job of doing it wrong. Taken from his speech, handout and website (all the same material):
As all my predecessors did, I tried to manage Oregon two years at a time around a biennial budget. There was no long term plan. We too often argued about the wrong things — and asked the wrong questions.
The State of Oregon has been in the business of simply balancing the budget, biennium to biennium, with little of no vision of what it was buying. But now, seven years removed from office and with experience in the private sector, Kitzhaber wants not just another crack at the governor’s job but a chance to do the budget right. That means getting away from, as he put it, trying to manage the state around the biennial budget:
“I think in many cases we asked the wrong questions and we argued about the wrong things. We asked how much we spent last year rather than what do we need to invest this year in order to get the outcomes we want tomorrow? We asked how much we’re spending rather than what are the results we’re getting for those expenditures of the public resources.”
Kitzhaber said that the means for delivering public services are at least a century or more old, systems that made sense back then but, obviously, “the world has changed dramatically since then but these delivery systems haven’t changed and they’re no longer capable of dealing with the complex realities of the 21st Century”.
(Government, at least under Kitz 2.0, no longer “provides services” but manages “delivery systems”. That’s good techo-speak, and dismally accurate, but probably not the way he’ll address swing voters on the campaign trail.)
To develop new “delivery systems” and transform the economy, Kitzhaber said there were three fundamentals to making transformation happen: no program can be considered untouchable, everything has to be challenged; the current state budget process has to be replaced with “one built on long-term, transparent, performance-based investment”; and a broad-base of support needs to be built that keeps the process moving despite the politics of the day.
The fun part of the rollout (talks about jobs and the economy are never fun, however important they are) was when the young reporter from 750 KXL kept trying to get Kitzhaber to saying something juicy about Measures 66 & 67 — Do you believe they’ll cost 70,000 jobs? How much damage will they do? — and Kitz simply refused to play along, instead remarking that the rhetoric is targeted to swing voters and, in his opinion, cutting $700 million from the budget during a recession is a bad idea.
The entire strategy is available to read or download at the website. It’s presented in a concise manner and takes about ten minutes to read through. Given that Oregon’s economy is on a first name basis with the Roto-rooter guy, studying up on the various proposals for saving the state? Not a bad idea.