Our Governess and her charade | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: Jim Bispo's weekly column appears in the Beaufort Observer.

    Our Governess says she wants to streamline State government by merging 13 Agencies and Departments into 8 cabinet level offices according to press reports. Reportedly the changes are going to save a ton of taxpayer money: reportedly $47M next year and $79M in the 12-13 year. Those projections were apparently made in the March 2011 time frame - which is when the proposal was embodied in Executive Order 85 signed Mar. 11, 2011. (So "next year" is the year that started July 1, 2011 - Hmmm...) All the sweetness and light that she promises may be a little difficult to come by in the real world. The fact is that we are dealing with an existing organization that seems to have developed without any thought for efficiency or effectiveness. In fact, looking at the list of NC agencies, boards, commissions (and what looks to be a lot of "patronage" organizations), it would seem that every time the legislature gave the executive branch a new task, a new organizational element was created to handle it. Click here to see a list. If you are not faint of heart, click on the "+" beside many of the organizations to get an even better idea of how large the bureaucracy really is.

    As an observer of way too many reorganizations to even count, I can tell you that the two things that they all seem to have in common is that they are going to save money, and they are going to improve service to the public. Well, there actually may be a third thing also. That would be that the first two virtually never come true.

    As an aside, I can only remember one reorganization which did not encompass both (or all three) of those observations. That would be back in the 1970s (as I recall) when the Administrator of the FAA, Najeeb Halaby (who was one of the better Administrators in the eyes of most folks), decided to decentralize the operation. He established (as I recall) seven Regional Offices with authority and responsibility for managing FAA activities in their geographic area. In sworn testimony before Congress, he informed the Appropriations Committee that doing so would cost more. His justification for the additional funding was improved service to the public. It worked; he got the money. The Regional organizations were established. The quality of their service to the public ebbed and flowed and there are a lot of folks who are more than willing to argue whether the reorganization was a success of failure. I believe the structure he established remains largely in place to this day. But I digress...

    The most common reasons for reorganizing seem to be either the result of public dissatisfaction with the performance of the organization or internally or externally generated evaluations of organizational performance. It is always interesting to observe the dynamics involved in resolving the problems surfaced by either of these two groups.

    There is frequently a lot of loud talk and a lot of wringing of hands. Heads seldom roll - even though in some cases they probably should. Instead, reorganizations are proposed. Boxes are shuffled from one place to another - and frequently the folks occupying those boxes go right along with them. People who weren't doing their jobs (or weren't doing them very well) get moved to other places in the organization where typically they continue to not do their jobs (or not do them very well). The notion that performance is magically going to improve because an organizational box is moved is a rather difficult thesis to accept. One of the things that I frequently marvel about is why the evaluators - who seem to know exactly how everything should be run - are almost never hired to run the reorganized operation.

    There is one other observation to be made. That is when an reorganization is fairly close to the end of a politician's tenure (as this one hopefully is), a reorganization can be effected in order to provide "protected civil service career positions" into which their political appointees can be assigned or transferred.. This helps to ensure continuing employment for a lot of political cronies. (This misdirection is required in North Carolina because clearly the Golden Leaf Foundation - or the transportation planning activity - can't accommodate them all.)

    Perhaps none of this is important. Perhaps what is important is that reorganizations are bureaucrats' way of creating the impression of doing something productive. That is most often interpreted by the long suffering taxpayers as progress. The argument is that things are going to be done more efficiently, and at lower cost. We, the long suffering tax payers, seem to buy into that notion time after time. Many of us who bother to check for the actual savings are frequently disappointed.

    The fact of the matter is that with every reorganization comes months of turmoil in anticipation of the reorganization and even greater turmoil after the reorganization is announced and even more turmoil after the office spaces are juggled and the desks moved. There are those who estimate that easily as much as a years' worth of productivity is lost whenever there is a major reorganization. Fortunately, depending on how significant the change, the informal organization will continue to see that things get done. If the reorganization disrupts the informal organization, not much will be accomplished until new informal relationships are established.

    In the instant case, our Governess may be long gone (hopefully) by the time things begin to settle down following this action. In the meantime, don't hold your breath waiting for the claimed savings to materialize.

    All organizations possess two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. Halaby made the FAA less vertical and more horizontal. Perdue is doing the opposite. She is combining more organizational paths into fewer channels. The German social scientist Robert Michels, in his 1911 book, Political Parties, stated that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies (control by a few at the top). The reasons behind the oligarchization process, he said, are: the indispensability of leadership; the tendency of all groups, including the organization leadership, to defend their interests; and the passivity of the led individuals more often than not taking the form of actual gratitude towards the leaders. In other words, power flows from the lower levels to the higher levels. That is, as long as the upper levels protect the lower levels who are bestowing the power on the top. As this happens, most of the members seek not to improve the productivity of the organization but to protect their position within the bureaucracy. They will identify those above them who are calling the shots and work to satisfy (or ingratiate themselves unto the power brokers above) and the efficiency with which the organization actually performs diminishes in inverse proportion to the amount of change imposed by those at the top. Survival trumps the work that is supposed to be being done.

    Expect the same thing to happen to the Governess' reorganization.

    D'ya think??