To consult or not to consult, that is the question, but the answer appears as mixed and muddled as the consultants' own conclusions. But this much is clear: All of them are charging the state's taxpayers staggering sums.
Yep, it's nice work if you can get it, and outfits like PFM Group Consulting out of Philadelphia and Ikaso Consulting of San Bruno, Calif., certainly can. PFM is to be paid up to $312,750 in your tax money, Gentle Reader and all too Generous Sucker, while Ikaso is to collect up to $336,800. It ain't easy keeping up with their haul, or even keeping all their names straight, but perhaps the state could find a consultant willing to do that, too, for a tidy bonus.
Those are scarcely the only costs involved in what's supposed to be a cost-cutting operation. Jane English, a state senator from North Little Rock, says the Legislature's workforce education task force also has a "facilitator" who's being paid through the state's Department of Career Education, formerly known as vocational education.
What's an expert anyway? The best working definition of that loaded term may be: Someone from at least 50 miles away who speaks a multisyllabic tongue indecipherable to the citizens he's supposed to be serving. Bryan King, the state senator from Green Forest, makes a lot of sense when he suggests that Arkansas' own Bureau of Legislative Research could do the jobs too often outsourced to experts--given a little help from the National Conference of State Legislatures, which keeps up with developments in politics state by state across the country.
Not for nothing have state governments in this country's ideally designed and well-balanced constitutional system been called laboratories of democracy--and it may be time to let them do the lab work case by case rather than entrust our future to the self-proclaimed experts known as consultants.
Perhaps the most useful talent of Arkansas' own Bureau of Legislative Research is not its mastery of any one subject but knowing when to keep quiet in general. To quote the bureau's director of research, Ms. Marty Garrity: "As nonpartisan staff of the Legislature, bureau employees do not take policy positions on issues or legislation. To do so would place bureau employees in the position of advocating for or against legislation and policies, and this is a role we cannot provide."
Those researchers are there not to take sides on an issue but to recommend legislation without fear or favor. They do their job without looking after their own interests, but only the state's. One only wishes the same could be said of all consultants.
Editorial on 09/27/2017