By Jeremy Alford, BusinessReport.com - All the pomp, pageantry and positioning that’s fueled the Commission on Streamlining Government is coming to a close—sort of—as members begin meeting on a weekly basis and voting on recommendations to send to the Legislature later this year. Granted, the commission, created by Gov. Bobby Jindal to address the state’s multi-year, billion-dollar shortfall, still is drenched in politics, but concrete results, for good or bad, are beginning to surface.

So far, the suggestions accepted by the commission have been wide-ranging in scope. Among them are proposals to reduce the number of state employees and the number of state vehicles; plans to increase the employee-to-management ratio in the Department of Social Service; efforts to consolidate and/or outsource certain state services and operations in the areas of social services, mental health, public health units and accounts receivable across state agencies. Some of the recommendations include specific expected cost savings. Most do not.

The commission, however, did not accept a recommendation pushed largely by Treasurer John Kennedy to create a single board for higher education, rather than the various panels now running the show. Sen. Jack Donahue, D-Mandeville, chair of the streamlining commission, ruled the motion out of order, explaining the Louisiana Postsecondary Education Review Commission has been charged with examining the state’s higher-education system.

Now the process moves into what could be the most important step: public input. “There is no doubt that we are going to have to reduce state spending, not only to deal with our short-term budget limitations, but also to move toward a more prudent and focused use of taxpayers’ dollars,” Donahue says. "We want to move in that direction with the public’s help.”

You can view all of the proposals and formally comment at senate.legis.state.la.us/streamline/. Such public comments will begin surfacing at the Oct. 27 meeting, and Donahue says the appropriate advisory groups “may or may not decide to revise their recommendations to the full commission” based on the input. The 10-member commission is facing a Dec. 15 deadline to submit its initial recommendations to the governor and Legislature. With the state facing a $1 billion shortfall in the 2010-11 budget year, Jindal has charged the commission to identify $802 million worth of savings in those recommendations.

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