2024 marked the third year for the Legislative Fiscal Analyst’s Operations and Performance Team (Ops. Team). In addition to completing three efficiency evaluations for the Departments of Corrections, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture and Food, the team also worked to further improve budgetary performance measurement and idea sharing through cross-pollination with other states.
Improving Agency Operations
Each year, the Ops. Team partners with the Results Management team from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget (GOPB) and various state agencies to conduct efficiency evaluations on key processes and make recommendations for improvement.
This year, the Department of Corrections asked for assistance optimizing inmate transfers throughout the state. Depending on where inmates have been transferred, it can be difficult to complete treatment programs required by the Board of Pardons and Parole before their original release dates. As a result, some inmates —at no fault of their own—were not able to take full advantage of mandatory earned time reductions, both delaying their release and impacting total prison capacity.
The Ops. Team analyzed throughput times, identified constraints like medical needs and security levels, and made recommendations to improve inmate placement decisions. Some examples of our recommendations include the following:
- Formalize the inmate placement decision-making process and establish a clear hierarchy of decision criteria
- Prioritize placements based on key constraints, such as inmates’ medical needs and security level (e.g., place inmates with lower medical needs in county jails rather than resource-intensive treatment facilities)
- Build buffer time into the system by basing inmates’ treatment program enrollment dates on their earliest likely day of release
The final report can be found here. Helping agencies identify and work with constraints in a system is a key tenet of the process improvement tools we apply.
Additionally, this week the team released their second efficiency evaluation report of the year, which looked at the intake process for reports of child abuse and neglect made to Child Protective Services within the Division of Child and Family Services. The recommendations for that system focused on standardizing intake protocols and providing alternative tools and resources that would allow workers to more efficiently process referrals.
Early next year, our final efficiency evaluation report for 2024 will be released, which focuses on optimizing the work of food and dairy safety inspectors at the Department of Agriculture and Food. Recommendations from that report zero in on methods to save travel time and improve the timeliness of inspections, having a large impact on the lives of Utah citizens who enjoy locally produced foods.
Measuring Budgetary Performance
This year, the Ops. Team worked on an internal project to realize process efficiencies related to the presentation, adoption, and reporting of line item performance measures, as well as laying groundwork for future performance dashboard enhancements. The Legislative Fiscal Analyst performs the role of identifying key insights from past and current funding that assist legislators with budgeting priorities. The goal of this project was to free up analysts’ time to make budgetary recommendations. Instead of spending valuable resources on ‘busy work’ to ensure the right measures made it into appropriations bills. Improvements will also help the budget team in the interim by improving the software used to track the outcomes from past state investments.
Historically, a mostly manual process shepherded subcommittee-approved measures into intent language, and upon passage by the Legislature, measures were then reported in the Budget of the State of Utah (BOTSU). Partnering with our office’s lead technologist and an IT analyst from the Division of Technology Services, a process to track the status of line item measures throughout their lifecycle was developed.
Flagging measures which were authorized by appropriations subcommittees for inclusion in appropriations bills and automating the generation of intent language were high priority changes to free up additional analyst time for insightful budget analysis.
Looking to the future, the Ops. Team is focusing on improving processes that facilitate reporting on measures for new funding items and line item performance trends. These improvements focused on funding items which need repeat reporting (due to requiring additional time for implementation). The team is also developing models that supply performance measure data into dashboards, another way that the Ops. Team is streamlining the processes for the legislative staff in order to free up capacity for future priorities.
Best Practices Across the Nation
In addition to internal improvements, the team engages in continual learning and often meets with other states and national organizations to share best practices. A few of the opportunities the team participated in this year include:
- Montana State Legislature’s Legislative Finance Committee: Montana is implementing a new performance system and reached out to a number of states for best practices to inform their new process. The Ops. Team joined the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and Tennessee’s Office of Evidence and Impact in presenting the Utah approach to visualizing performance and measuring both new and base funding.
- Governing for Results Network (NCSL): The Governing for Results Network has been a key driver in collaboration with other states. This year the team presented their new dashboard visualization and explained cross-branch collaboration processes. The conference and presentation resulted in several meetings with new state partners.
- National Directors Meeting: Directors from across the country have a quarterly virtual meeting, and while most represent the Executive branch, the Ops. Team has been able to bring the Legislative perspective to discussions on how states can improve performance and learned valuable insights from other state governments.
- The Colorado Lab: The mission of the lab is to guide action using data, and they work with the State of Colorado to bridge the gap in policy, budget and results. This new partnership promises to be one of the drivers that will improve Utah’s cross-branch collaboration and evidence based decision making in 2025.
- Utah Taxpayers Association: The Ops. Team was asked to present how they used visualization to make performance metrics more accessible to legislators and more transparent to taxpayers. An accomplishment that will be further expanded in the new year.
You can access the Ops. Team’s 2024 annual update to the Legislative Management Council as well as this year’s efficiency evaluations at budget.utah.gov.