Denish's hot line, a feckless feel good.

Lt. Governor Diane Denish has followed up on the Journal coverage of her new "Efficiency Hot Line" with an email to her supporters. In which she wrote;

...we all must do more to make government leaner and more efficient.

We simply must root out wasteful spending wherever it exists, and find creative ways for government to do more with less.
... I established an efficiency hot line ..., so that the government's customers - you - can offer recommendations on how the state can do things more efficiently.

In order for an efficiency hot line to produce meaningful savings; a very particular set of circumstances must exist;

1. there must be inefficiencies in state government, and
2. those inefficiencies must remain unaddressed simply because, and only because, no one (in power) knows about them.

I will concede the first point without hesitation.

The second deserves some scrutiny.

I will use the New Mexico Public
Education Department, and,
Secretary Veronica Garcia as the
example.

If the Efficiency Hot Line points to
any meaningful inefficiency in the
NMPED, that inefficiency exists for
one of two reasons;

1. Secretary Garcia is unaware of it, or
2. she is aware of it and either cannot or will not do anything about it.

If she is unaware of significant inefficiencies, then why is she being paid $177,407.36 a year? Is it not reasonable to expect that after years in the office, she would have ferreted out the significant inefficiencies; all of them?

If she is aware of those significant inefficiencies and either cannot or will not fix them, then what good is it going to do to report them on Denish's Efficiency Hot Line? What would be the point?

The end result of the Efficiency Hot Line will be to report insignificant inefficiencies, paperclip and staples savings, and to make taxpayers feel good. The hope is, the "good feeling" with translate into votes.

The hot line has been up for a week; long enough for any real inefficiency to have been reported. Has one significant inefficiency been reported? If so, what is it and, what is being done about it?

The real advantage to having a hot line as the only mechanism for dealing with public corruption and incompetence, is that they can then be kept under wraps.

If taxpayers really want to eliminate inefficiencies in state government, the most direct path is to hire impartial efficiency experts, who will actually ferret out all of the inefficiencies and report them to the public record. Then and only then, will those inefficiencies be eliminated.

Not with some silly, utterly disingenuous Efficiency Hot Line.




photos Mark Bralley