Businesses have long complained about the bureaucratic backlog in state government. But now some state agencies are looking to shake a business unfriendly stigma by taking a page out of the private sector to reduce the size and cost of government.
There is a widespread effort among state agencies to adopt “lean” principals, a discipline commonly used in manufacturing for streamlining and efficiency.
The state departments of Environmental Protection and Labor have both undertaken lean projects that have led to cost savings, reduced workload backlogs, and cuts to permitting process times, state officials said.
The DEP, for example, has been able to reduce by 62 percent — from 294 days to 113 days — the time needed to process loan applications for municipal wastewater treatment projects.
That’s a start but business leaders remain skeptical, and say it will take time to see if it will make a fundamental difference.
“On the plus side, I think it’s a good thing they are venturing into the world of lean,” said Eric Brown, a lobbyist for the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. “But lean is a continual process, and while the departments have made some improvements that are statistically significant, we would argue that there is still a lot of room for improvement.”
Lean is a waste-reduction technique that examines an agency’s processes, and identifies and eliminates redundancies to ultimately expedite services. Its principles were first established by Japanese manufacturers, but the concept has been popular in the United States for more than 20 years.
The state’s lean efforts began years ago in the Department of Labor, but were most recently used by DEP, an agency advocates have complained is among the least business friendly.
Connecticut’s lean efforts come at a time when states across the country are attempting to streamline their operations against a backdrop of budget problems that have led to staffing and resource cutbacks, said Curtis Clark, the global director of regional and local government for IBM’s Center for the Business of Government, a public management and research firm.
Minnesota, for example, adopted its own lean program for state government in 2008. It looked at everything from the delivery of birth certificates to managing license systems, Clark said.
“We are seeing a number of states taking a fresh look at how governments are organized,” Clark said. “Top level executives in a number of state governments are creating new commissions and putting teams in place to determine how private sector practices can be brought into the public sector.”
As part of their economic development strategies, Connecticut lawmakers have said they want to streamline the permitting process across state agencies and remove or alter regulations that are duplicative, outdated, or in some cases overbearing to businesses.
And Gov. M. Jodi Rell has started a task force that will examine ways to cut through red tape and eliminate backlogs.
DEP Commissioner Amey Marrella said her staff has led 19 lean projects so far. Through a week-long exercise, staff teams identify needed improvements by mapping out their current processes and determining areas that can be improved to cut waste. The groups then develop a one-year plan to implement those changes.
Overall, it’s been successful, Marrella said. Dock permits, for example, which had been issued an average of 550 days after application, are now down to about 100 days.
And the agency has reduced the time it takes to review a company’s response to a water enforcement violation, from 60 days to just under 12 days. It also reduced the backlog of violation notices from nearly 1,000, to 222, Marrella said.
“I think we’ve developed a reputation of being an impediment because things have taken a long time,” Marrella said. “But I hope the business community realizes at this point that reputation is no longer deserved. We have done a lot to make ourselves more responsive to them. “
Jeff Caiola, a supervising civil engineer at DEP, oversaw a lean exercise to streamline the permitting process for land use projects.
Before the effort, Caiola said, it took about a year and a half for the agency to review and approve projects that impacted wetlands, including major economic developments like the construction of retail centers.
The problem, Caiola said, was that the agency would get bogged down with applications that were incomplete, but it wouldn’t notify project developers, in some cases, until six months after the application was submitted.
To streamline permitting, the agency revamped the front end of the review process. Now it reviews each application and notifies developers within 90 days of whether or not their application is complete. That’s cut response times by 40 percent, and helped reduce their backlog from 300 pending applications to about 130.
Marrella also noted that just because things are done quicker, it doesn’t mean the agency has reverted to being a rubber stamp of approval.
“The environmental bar remains the same,” Marrella said.
Stephen Dombrowski, a lean program coordinator for the state, said lean efforts in the DOL have led to more than $2 million in savings over the years. He said the department has reengineered or automated certain services and reduced the amount of time it takes to process the payroll.
“If you can do more with less, you’ll be more prudent with taxpayer dollars,” Dombrowski said.
Amey Marrella, commissioner, DEP
