MISSOURI WATCH: WASTED COST OF RE-INVENTING THE WHEEL

I would venture that most Missourians who have served on a state board, commission or advisory group have also participated in what, for want of a better description, is reinventing the wheel. Granted, that's a broad statement but there must be written, somewhere in the bureaucratic bible, a commandment requiring state and federal agencies to reorganize themselves every biennium or quadrennium. It seems to be an inviolate rule in government that changing the guard also requires changing the methods of delivering service.

Some may wonder where's the harm in this rule. Isn't it a good idea for every public office to make itself more efficient in order that the public can be better served? This question can be addressed in two ways, namely:

1. Reorganization usually requires the investment of huge sums of public (make that taxpayer) hard-earned money.

2. Reorganization also requires the time and attention of virtually every departmental director, assistant director and much of the support staff, thus hindering the agency from carrying out its principal responsibility of serving the public.

I was reminded of this counterproductive practice the other day when a heavy package arrived from the Missouri Department of Mental Health, bearing impressive looking documents that were labeled "Implementing Missouri's Show Me System Redesign: A Public Discussion Paper." Just one of the documents contains 154 8 1/2 x 11 size pages, which by my calculation will require at least eight hours of solid reading and note taking, not to mention highlighting. The Appendix alone is 60 pages.

The cover letter on Page 1 informs the reader that the accompanying material "describes preliminary plans for a redesigned psychiatric and substance abuse treatment services and support system that is built upon the philosophy and principles of early access, appropriate treatment and recovery and that will improve services for consumers and families."

Bravo! All of us are in favor of the introductory "philosophy and principles" of early, appropriate treatment and thousands of mentally ill are praying for "recovery." This is, after all, what any reasonable mental health program should foster, even as scores of agency employees are spending their time preparing 154-page studies on how this allegedly elusive delivery system can meet its constitutional duties.

Having served for nearly two decades on state mental health commissions, let me inject at this point the rather relevant fact that "Implementing Missouri's Show Me System Redesign" is not the first of its kind.

Its genre started back in the 1950s when Missouri finally got around to changing its mental health system from a politically operated caretaker agency to one that could deliver modern, effective psychiatric services to thousands of unfortunate men, women and children who were literally trapped in ancient snake pits. I would like to think that the first persons involved in this changeover were motivated by human compassion, but I am also aware that some measure of its momentum was triggered by a strong political desire to avoid public disclosure and negative publicity.

The first reorganization effort of which I am familiar occurred when the first director under the reorganized system arrived in the late 1950s. He began the first changes that were viewed as a nearly perfect delivery system. His successor started another reorganization plan. And the successor of the successor proposed still another plan. The point is, reorganization of mental health delivery systems is almost as old as the 1945 Missouri Constitution, which, incidentally, provided a later abandoned plan to reorder the department.

Some of the reorganization plans even called for the expertise of outside management firms, and several have been utilized over the past half century to work their magic. I must say the overriding memory of these experts from as far away as New York is their high billing practices. Much of what they advised was about as substantive as meringue icing.

I apologize to my friends in the mental health agency for making it appear, thus far, that they are the sole practitioners of reinventing the wheel in Jefferson City. Far from it, for almost every agency known to mankind and the press has inaugurated reorganizational efforts, as witness changes offered in such diverse departments as Social Services, Highways and Transportation, Economic Development and Labor & Industrial Relations, to name just some of the better known redesigns.

Departmental directors aren't the only ones who like to leave their scent around the Capitol. During the administration of one governor back in the 1970s, there was an attempt made to change the delivery of services for the whole shooting match. The group that met on a regular basis, with the help of some expensive staffing, was known as the Governmental Reorganization Commission, and after months and months of meetings, conferences and telephone calls, the commission brought forth its plans, which to the embarrassment of those of us who served as members, was glaringly inadequate and unnecessarily fuzzy.

Not all reorganization plans are unneeded, but service delivery should be made with the least possible disruption to consumers with the least amount of confusion, red tape and bureaucratic nonsense as possible. It doesn't require genius to provide services if they are properly funded and supplied with the least amount of administrative cost and oversight.

Each time a state agency decides to reorganize, its constituents can be assured of fewer direct services, more complicated delivery systems and unnecessary confusion and delay. For Missouri's taxpayers, this political wheel-invention practice is like having to pay for your mother-in-law's advice.