From the Tribune (Editorial):

Another report for the heap?

Published November 14, 2006

The latest prescription for how to improve Cook County's overstaffed and slipshod government reads like the others before it. A transition team formed by interim County Board President Bobbie Steele has produced 80 pages of worthy if timid proposals, many of them recycled from previous schemes for fixing county government.

There are, however, a few telling acknowledgments in this report's earnest bureaucratese:

- Decades of patronage and administrative bloat have mired the county's Bureau of Health Services in a legacy of busted budgets and efficiency-averse management. The bureau is so dead-in-the-head that it hasn't bothered to bill government programs and private insurers for untold millions in expenditures that should have been reimbursed. Consider this howler from the report: "In budget year 2005, the Bureau of Health Services reported a revenue shortfall of over $60 million as a result of unbilled revenues." And what lesson did the derelict health bureaucrats learn from that self-inflicted wound? "By May 2006, they had reported a revenue shortfall greater than that for the entire preceding fiscal year, again resulting largely from unbilled revenues." (Emphasis ours.) The county has lopped off a couple of heads, but lots of other moribund managers still get paychecks. Why?

- County health officials for many years have shrieked that all the political hires on their payroll are a hard-working lot. How to explain, then, this finding from a survey of Bureau of Health employees: In response to the statement, "Employees are well managed and most are working at 80 to 100 percent of their capacity," 36 percent responded True--while 59 percent said False. Imagine the bloodbath at your workplace if that much incompetence and laziness prevailed.

- A list of 13 recommendations for fixing county contract and procurement protocols begins with, "Develop a purchasing manual to standardize the procurement process." The people who've been running a $3 billion enterprise need to be told that? Apparently so--for the same reason frustrated coaches of losing teams feel compelled to say, "This is a football."

The most important passage in the document: After listing many of the excellent, how-to-fix-this-mess reports of recent years from civic groups, county finance executives (their department actually functions superbly) and County Board member Michael Quigley, Steele's transition team says its budget and finance committee "noted that a common theme, implicit throughout the previously issued reports, was the absence of a `will to action.' The action to enact policy changes and/or proactively contain costs within inflation in a timely manner was absent."

That's a polite way of saying Cook County government spends too much effort coddling its politically clouted workers and contractors--and not enough effort delivering good, cost-efficient services to people who need them. If incoming County Board President Todd Stroger succumbs to the same inertia, Steele's transition document will be just another report for the heap.

Steele's interim term concludes in early December. Thus her transition report essentially is a gift to Stroger. With county performance so lousy and looming deficits so large, Stroger now has every reason to streamline departments and slash costs--and no excuse for not doing so.

Stroger campaigned on a pledge to cut thousands of jobs, pushing the workforce down to 22,000. We had hoped for a transition report that enumerated consolidations and other actions to get beneath that still-featherbedded level.

So while Steele's report is useful if repetitive of others before it, she can give it life by now proposing an aggressive cost-cutting budget for the fiscal year that starts in only two-plus weeks.

And Mr. Stroger, you need no more studies or reports or audits or plans or reviews. You need what county government lacks: a will to action.