Gov. Martin O?Malley told his Cabinet Thursday, “Every single transition report said you need more staff to do your job,” but the budget reality is that they?re going to have to get by with less.
“Many of you will be called on to make sizable reductions in your budgets,” O?Malley told the department chiefs.
One way O?Malley hopes to do that is by implementing StateStat, a program for regular detailed measurements of state programs and their effectiveness developed in Baltimore as CitiStat. The governor gave a pep talk on the program to 20 Cabinet secretaries.
At meetings that will occur as frequently as every two weeks, Cabinet secretaries and lower-level policymakers and managers will present a wealth of data about their departments to O?Malley, his top staff and other Cabinet officials.
“If you measure every two weeks, you make progress every two weeks,” O?Malley said. “It?s a dialogue and a collaboration,” he said, adding that the program was not meant to be like giving someone a blindfold and a cigarette and putting them in front of a firing squad.
Reporters were asked to leave the room before the Cabinet secretaries responded to the governor?s presentation. Matthew Gallagher, a deputy chief of staff who headed CitiStat and is leading implementation at the state, said the secretaries reacted with “eagerness and a hint of anxiety” at the level of scrutiny.
In the campaign and since the election, O?Malley made repeated promises to bring CitiStat to the state level, but that has brought increased attention to the process.
“Nobody was watching the first months and weeks of CitiStat,” Gallagher said, but now they will watch StateStat.
BayStat Ordered
O?Malley issued his first executive order Thursday to implement BayStat, another version of CitiStat, “for measuring and evaluating efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay.”
“If it?s done right, it?s going to unify the agencies” in improving the Bay, said John Griffin, secretary of Natural Resources, one of four departments with responsibility for the Bay. It will also help to “engage the citizens with data that makes some sense.”
The federal Environmental Protection Agency had been somewhat reluctant to cooperate in a program where conditions in the Bay?s various tributaries would be compared, Griffin said. But “we?re not making enough progress” on efforts to clean up the Bay, he said.
