Senator Tom Brewer
43rd District
10-25-2019

Another round of interim study hearings were held in my committee on Friday, October 25th. The first hearing was on Senator John Lowe’s LR 187. This resolution directed us to look into whether Nebraska could save money by hiring an outside firm to conduct an efficiency review of state agencies.

Eric Schnurer, a Philadelphia-based consultant, briefed us on reviews that have been conducted for seven other state governments, Iowa and Wyoming. These reviews take a hard look at existing policies and procedures. Some of these rules and regulations made sense in years past but need to be revisited. Some were never very efficient.

Other states found savings on big-ticket items like policy reform in Corrections, Health & Human Services, and Transportation, along with smaller changes like printing on both sides of a piece of paper, or making sure that salt spreaders on snow plows are calibrated to use the correct amount of road salt. Even the small stuff adds up to real money: taxpayer savings from efficiency reviews in other states ranged from tens of millions of dollars annually in North Carolina to billions of dollars in states like Louisiana and Iowa.

Jason Jackson, the director of Nebraska’s Department of Administrative Services, came up to the testifier’s chair next. He told the committee about the governor’s Center for Operational Excellence, which has trained more than fifteen thousand state employees on process improvement. He reported that we are starting to see the fruits of those changes.

Wait times for Access Nebraska that were over 24 minutes are now down to under five minutes. Applications are shorter, processing times are shorter, and Nebraska’s reforms are now being used as a case study by the Harvard Business Institute. Mr. Jackson said that his team has helped reduce the taxpayer-funded state government workforce by 800 positions since he joined the Ricketts administration.

After a recent visit to Valentine, I heard about increased paperwork hassles for some of our seniors in assisted-living facilities. During our hearing, I made sure to ask Mr. Jackson about how we might cut some red tape there. He promised me on the record that he would work with me to address the problem.

The second hearing was on LR 92, also introduced by Senator Lowe. This interim study was focused on over-regulation. Lots of groups across the country have analyzed the effects of old, broken regulations, and how too much government slows down economic growth. James Broughel from the Mercatus Center in Virginia gave us an idea of how many regulations we have on the books here in Nebraska: a total of 100,627 restrictions across 7.5 million words.

Former Senator Nicole Fox, now with the Platte Institute in Omaha, delivered a short history lesson on recent projects in Nebraska to trim the regulatory load. Among those efforts was executive action by Governor Ricketts requiring agencies to review and rewrite mountains of old regulations. We have made some progress on the problem of big government in Nebraska. I think we still have a long way to go, especially for our small businesses.

Please contact my office with any comments, questions, or concerns. Email me at tbrewer@leg.ne.gov, mail a letter to Sen. Tom Brewer, Room #1423, P.O. Box 94604, Lincoln, NE 68509, or call us at (402) 471-2628.