Category Archives: State government

Is college worth it?

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Is college worth the cost, is the current model sustainable, and how can colleges and universities more effectively meet state and student needs?

Those are questions that policymakers, along with colleges and universities, must answer in a world that can change a lot in four years.

On Monday, Clint Vogus, an Arkansas State University business instructor, and Dr. Thomas Lindsay, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Higher Education, told legislators that college doesn’t provide the same value it once did. Tuition costs have increased, and so has student debt, to $1.2 trillion nationally, making it the second largest source of consumer debt after home mortgages.

How big is the student debt problem? Americans, including the many who did not graduate, owe more in student debt than they do in credit card debt. Lindsay said giving students more scholarships won’t solve the problem. In fact, it will make it worse because the more government dollars that come into the system, the more colleges and universities raise the price.

The two were testifying before the Legislative Task Force to Study the Realignment of Higher Education, one of many groups appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and legislators. Those groups exist to guide policy changes, to respond to changes that are already occurring, or just to ride the wave in education, health care, highways and prisons.

Vogus and Lindsay argued that despite the rising costs, a college education isn’t worth what it used to be for students or the state. Too many degree plans don’t lead to good jobs, and too many needs in the workforce aren’t being filled. Surveys indicate that students are studying less but earning a lot more A’s, and it’s not because they’ve become smarter. We’re told that, even if the world changes, college is supposed to make students more well-rounded and teach lifelong critical thinking and reasoning skills. But a 2011 report, “Academically Adrift,” found that’s often not the case. As measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, 36 percent of college grads didn’t show any improvement in those areas after four years of college.

Dr. Chuck Welch, president of the Arkansas State University System, defended the value of a college education as “still the greatest investment I’ve ever made in my entire life or ever will make in my entire life.” He pointed out that college graduates as a group make much higher incomes, are less likely to be incarcerated or be dependent on food stamps, and even live longer than those whose education stopped after high school.

In that respect, the numbers are clear, but the cause and effect relationship is not. Do college graduates earn more money because they have a degree? Or is it because they’re more likely to come from wealthier, educated families? In other words, did college put them on second base, or were they born there?

Progress will come slowly in this area, but it may actually come. A consensus has developed that college is too expensive and that it’s not meeting workforce needs. Vogus proposed a 90-hour degree that could be completed in three years. His employer, Arkansas State University, recently announced a three-year plan, though it relies on summer school and doesn’t reduce the required hours. Lindsay said that Texas A&M – Commerce responded to a challenge by former Gov. Rick Perry to offer a $10,000 degree by creating one that costs not much more, in part by offering most of the first two years of classes online.

If workforce needs don’t change colleges and universities, then economics might. State dollars are flat. Bain and Company, a management consulting firm, says that 43 percent of colleges and universities nationwide spend more than they can afford. The 14-17-year-old demographic that feeds colleges and universities isn’t growing. And the word is out that a college degree is not a guaranteed route to a better job.

Meanwhile, students have other choices. For $12,000, they can learn computer coding in 12 weeks of intensive training at The Iron Yard, a chain of private schools with a location in Little Rock.

In less than three months, they’ll be qualified for a very good job. They won’t have the college experiences that are meant to make them more well-rounded. But then, they can do that on their own time, independent of taxpayers, using the money they’re making.

Pay DHS director like a football coach

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The highest paid state employee is Bret Bielema, the head football coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks. He will make $4 million this year. Meanwhile, the director of the Department of Human Services – an agency that serves 1.4 million Arkansans with 7,500 employees – will earn $163,000.

It might be time, if not to reverse that mindset, then at least to rethink it.

The current DHS director, John Selig, announced last week that he is leaving his post at the end of this year, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson is searching for his replacement. It needs to be a good one, but there are challenges. Talking to reporters Wednesday, Hutchinson said, “There are some salary constraints for being able to attract someone from the private sector or someone that’s led a large organization, so we’ll have to look at that, but we’ll see what we can do.”

We’ll see what we can do. Those are not words that University of Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long has to say when looking for a new coach.

DHS is state government’s largest agency. It has an $8.35 billion budget. It pays for medical care for lower-income Arkansans. It serves patients in nursing homes and serves clients with a range of disabilities. It’s in charge of state adoption and foster care services.

It juggles a lot of balls, and lately it has been dropping a few of them. Costs for a new system to determine Medicaid eligibility have ballooned to $200 million, more than twice the expected amount. A consultant advising legislators about reforming health care found almost 43,000 Arkansas Medicaid beneficiaries with out-of-state addresses. It’s not clear exactly what that means, but it’s not good.

This is not meant as a criticism of Selig, who’s had a tough job managing a sprawling agency. In the past few years, DHS has had to respond to many big changes, including health care reform and the private option, which is the controversial program where federal Medicaid dollars buy private insurance for lower-income Arkansans.

The important question is, who is the best person for the job moving forward, and how do we get him or her? And the answer is, we’re not going to, not with a salary of $163,000 a year. That’s the kind of money you might pay a longtime state employee who’s worked his way up and is not far from retirement, not a dynamic visionary who can modernize and streamline an organization.

It’s not just the director’s position, but also the salaries of his or deputies. One of the reasons Bielema came to Arkansas was his frustration with what he could pay his assistants at Wisconsin. He knew an organization is only as strong as its second layer of leadership.

Hutchinson said that he’s “looking outside the norm” in his job search, meaning the next DHS director doesn’t have to be a person with experience in human services. Instead, he said, “We’ve got to have somebody that can understand $200 million (information technology) contracts, that can minimize the risk for the taxpayers, that can work with the Legislature, that can recruit the right talent for the different levels of DHS as well.”

Those people are hard to find. In fact, you’ve got to make them want to come to you. The Legislature should pony up and raise the salaries of the director and his top officials significantly. That’s how you attract qualified people who know, like Bielema and his staff do, that if they don’t produce, someone else will take their jobs.

Meanwhile, maybe state leaders should consider funding a private foundation to supplement salaries for top jobs across state agencies. Private sources pay most of Bielema’s salary. A foundation increased the salary for Mike Preston, the new Arkansas Economic Development Commission director.

There’s a reason why football coach Nick Saban won national championships at LSU and then Alabama, and why Urban Meyer won national championships at Florida and then Ohio State. Some people are the best at what they do.

Arkansas should try to hire the Nick Saban of DHS directors. Spending hundreds of thousands on leadership can save hundreds of millions in costs. When the Razorbacks had a head coaching position open, everyone knew the job would pay a high salary, because failure on the football field is unacceptable. Likewise, when managing state government’s largest agency whose responsibilities include nursing homes, the disabled, and foster kids, it’s not enough just to see what we can do.

Drivers, can you spare a dime?

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Considering a gallon of gasoline is now $2 less than it was not long ago, is now the time to raise gas taxes a dime? Some say yes, if the state is committed to maintaining its highways. Others say no, including legislators and, in a recent poll, a clear majority of Arkansans.

Here’s the problem. Highways traditionally have been funded by the people who use them – drivers of passenger and commercial vehicles through gas and diesel taxes. However, those taxes have remained the same for a long time – effectively cut, actually, because they were not indexed to inflation. The federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has been the same since 1993 even though it costs more to maintain highways. The state gasoline tax of 21.5 cents per gallon hasn’t changed since 2001.

Inflation isn’t the only issue facing the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department. Since 1993, vehicles have become more fuel efficient, which means drivers pay less in fuel taxes to drive on roads that are becoming more expensive to maintain. Because continuing to increase fuel efficiency is a national goal, the entire transportation infrastructure is funded by a revenue source that is destined to decline.

Even members of Congress agree this is a problem, though they can’t agree on a solution. The federal Highway Trust Fund, which funds 70 percent of Arkansas highway construction, is being kept on life support by yet another one of those half-baked measures passed this summer at the last minute that merely postpones a difficult decision. Faced with a similar situation last year, Congress paid for one year of spending by borrowing from the next 10 years’ worth of revenues. That year is over, and now Congress is trying to find a longer term solution on a short deadline. Its recent track record doesn’t inspire confidence.

In Arkansas, a bill this year by Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, would have dedicated to highways the taxes collected from sales of new and used cars. Those taxes currently go into a big pot that pays for a lot of other things. The bill passed a House committee but then went nowhere. Gov. Asa Hutchinson was opposed, as were a lot of other interests funded by that big pot.

Hutchinson did, however, appoint a task force that has been trying to craft a solution. One idea by the Arkansas Good Roads Foundation, a business group, would increase fuel taxes by 10 cents per gallon and then gradually shift new and used car sales taxes to highways, with the fuel tax lowered back to current levels as that shift occurs.

Some legislators, including Douglas, say a fuel tax hike isn’t going to happen. Legislators won’t support anything that looks or even smells like a tax – not even a dime, and not even when fuel prices are low.

They’ve been hearing from their constituents, who voted for a half-cent sales tax for roads three years ago and don’t want to pay more taxes. A recent poll by the Arkansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, an anti-tax group, found that two-thirds of Arkansans said fixing the state’s highways is a crisis (16 percent) or a major problem (50 percent). But almost that same percentage oppose raising the gas tax. In fact, 45 percent strongly oppose it. Half said a legislator’s support of a gas tax increase would make them less likely to vote for them.

In other words, they’re saying, “Fix the roads, but take the money from state government’s big pot – or at least, some other pot besides mine.”

There are other partial solutions. Only about two-thirds of state highway taxes go to state highways; most of the rest goes to city and county roads and some unnecessarily to state government administration. That formula certainly could be tweaked. Moreover, the state maintains a lot of highway miles that are really local arteries, such as busy Cantrell Road in Little Rock. There’s talk of letting cities and counties assume some of those responsibilities. Guess who’s opposed to that?

There’s one other argument: Some say enough money is devoted to highways, but it’s going to the wrong places. Some legislators say the money should better follow the cars.

That solution may not be affordable, either. Maybe the Highway Department should focus on maintaining what it has and let the cars follow the roads that are already laid. Those roads might be crowded, but at least they would stay paved, and paid for.

The private option ink blot

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You know those tests where therapists ask clients to describe an ink blot because people see what they’re inclined to see? This week, legislators were given a 450-page one.

That would be the report by The Stephen Group, the consulting firm hired by the Health Reform Legislative Task Force to help it decide what to do about the private option in particular and Medicaid in general.

Here’s the ink blot part: Legislators who support the private option can be encouraged by the report because it recommends changing it but not ending it. Meanwhile, opponents can point to a finding that 43,000 people served by Medicaid and the private option may not live in Arkansas, while the programs combined enroll 500 people who are deceased.

Here’s the background. Medicaid is the government health program serving the poor, the disabled, and the aged who live in nursing homes. It’s mostly but not entirely funded by the federal government and mostly administered by states. The Affordable Care Act, which created Obamacare, expanded Medicaid in all the states to cover more lower-income people. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional but that the Medicaid expansion must be only voluntary. Many states said no.

Arkansas created the private option. Instead of expanding Medicaid, it uses those dollars to buy private health insurance for Arkansans not covered by Medicaid and having incomes of no more than 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Republican legislators had the idea and worked with then-Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, to implement it.

In some ways, it’s been a success. It’s currently serving about 200,000 Arkansans, give or take tens of thousands because the state is in the process of redetermining eligibility. According to a Gallup poll, the state’s uninsured rate fell from 22.5 percent in 2013 to 9.1 percent during the first half of 2015. That’s the best in the country, and the private option was a big reason why. Without the private option, hospitals would provide $1 billion in uncompensated care from 2017-21, according to the report. The private option is bringing $1 billion in federal funds to the Arkansas economy every year.

But that’s still a billion dollars in taxpayer money, opponents say, which increases the national debt. While the feds are paying for all of it now, Arkansas will be responsible for 10 percent of the cost in the next few years. It was supposed to serve the working poor, but 40 percent of its beneficiaries had no income last year, so it’s still a health care entitlement program. It’s still Obamacare.

The private option was created in 2013. It must be approved by 75 percent of legislators each year. It barely passed the first time and barely survived in 2014. We can’t keep doing this. So this year, Gov. Asa Hutchinson asked legislators to extend the private option through 2016 while it created the task force to decide what to do next.

Back to the ink blot. The small consulting firm found what the state’s huge Department of Human Services could not: 42,891 Medicaid and private option beneficiaries whose best addresses appear to be located out of state, including 3,220 whose best addresses are in California. Almost 500 on the rolls were dead before they even became a part of the program.

It’s unknown how much of this represents waste and abuse. It’s unclear how many actual dollars are going to the wrong places. A program this big will have challenges with its mailing list. Some people with California addresses may have moved to Arkansas recently.

Still, private option opponents can point to this report and say they were right all along, that government can’t do anything correctly, and the private option should be scrapped.

But the report didn’t recommend that. Instead, it said the private option should be retooled to become more of a transitional program that encourages work and personal responsibility – which, supporters would say, was the plan all along. Participants should look for work and meet health and wellness goals. Legislators might consider limiting participation in the private option to a few years. Meanwhile, the state should create an office that monitors the eligibility of all Arkansans seeking state services, including the private option.

Members of the task force must make their own recommendation by the end of this year. Will they vote to end the private option, or change it? It depends on what they see in the ink blot.

Hutchinson will wrestle less with execution role than previous governors

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Sometime in the very near future, a night will come when Arkansas will execute its first inmate since 2005.

Eight inmates have exhausted their appeals, and a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling seems to remove the biggest obstacle that has kept them alive – concerns over the effectiveness of the sedative that puts the condemned to sleep before the lethal drugs are administered. Still, there will be legal challenges, including one already filed over a state law passed this year that shields the identities of the drugs’ vendors.

The night of the first execution, assuming it occurs, Gov. Asa Hutchinson will be the one person in the world who could throw a life preserver to a drowning man – who, of course, will have been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of drowning someone else. Hutchinson alone could stop the execution with a phone call.

Asked in his office if he’d considered what that night will be like, the former director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. attorney, said, “I’ve been in law enforcement a long time, but I haven’t thought about that. … It’s a serious thing. My objectives in life in terms of these type of cases is that you’re sure that the system works; that innocence is protected; guilt is established; and the system works; and it is reviewed; and they have competent counsel; then it’s my responsibility to carry out the law. We’re not there yet, so … you just simply do your duty until you get to that moment and you address it then.”

Some previous governors have felt more personally responsible. Hutchinson’s predecessor, Gov. Mike Beebe, never had to preside over an execution and said he was glad he didn’t. Gov. Mike Huckabee did preside over executions, and it troubled him to his core.

In January 1997, Arkansas efficiently executed three men in one night. Three weeks before it happened, I asked the then-new governor in a press conference how he felt about his role in the process. It was not his first execution. He said it was much easier to talk about the death penalty before he was responsible for carrying one out. Tears appeared in his eyes as he described the burden he felt.

“”There’s never a night in a person’s life that’s more god-awful, gut-wrenching than the night you personally have the responsibility to stop a man’s death, or not,” he said. “Anybody who feels good about it is a very sick person.”

Despite his misgivings, Huckabee allowed those executions, and others, to proceed. One of his predecessors, Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, did not. Deeply opposed to the death penalty, he ordered a stay of all executions. After his defeat in 1970, he announced that he was commuting the sentences of all 15 men on Death Row.

“What earthly mortal has the omnipotence to say who among us shall live and who shall die? I do not,” he said in an emotional news conference. “Moreover, in that the law grants me authority to set aside the death penalty, I cannot and will not turn my back on lifelong Christian teachings and beliefs merely to let history run out its course on a fallible and failing theory of punitive justice.”

On Dec. 31, 1970, two days after that announcement, Rockefeller visited what had been Death Row and personally spoke to each inmate there. His 22-year-old son, Win, was at his side as an observer. The man who defeated Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, later said he appreciated his predecessor commuting those sentences because it meant he would not have to preside over any executions.

Will Hutchinson be as conflicted as Huckabee, Bumpers or Beebe? It seems unlikely.

For a man who has spent much of his life in law enforcement, the execution will be the last act in a process that has involved many steps and many people. It will be the judicial process that will be responsible – and of course, the condemned. A horrific crime was committed, a fair trial occurred, and guilt was determined beyond reasonable doubt. And so while theoretically on that night he could toss that life preserver, I don’t think he’ll see that as part of his role.

He’ll see his role as carrying out the law regarding executions, while some previous governors couldn’t help but feel like they were sort of the executioner itself.