Representative Stebbins appeared before the Committee on Tuesday to introduce her bill, H.194. She prefaced the conversation by saying that she does a lot of work nationally around the rollout and management of energy programs.

The bill would create the Legislative Office of Government Accountability to help monitor and improve the performance of state government and it’s “prioritized investments” in individuals and businesses, the economy, the natural environment, and infrastructure.

The job of this new office to assess the extent to which state government is sufficiently and appropriately staffed to meet its obligations and to ensure that public funds are being used appropriately and in the manner for which they were appropriated. Additionally, this would ideally include some mechanism of tracking policy outcomes and performance and report to state legislators to tell them “that bill you passed really isn’t serving your constituents.”

Representative Hooper commented that we used to have a “Government Planning Office” for this purpose and wondered why the state got rid of it. Stebbins thought it was scrapped because it was relatively new and it wasn’t clear where the office should sit. She believes definitively that it should be under the legislative branch.

Representative Waters-Evans wondered if there were any non-profits out there that might be “doing this work piecemeal already.” Stebbins thought that some of this was happening, but that the key area here was coordination (which is not happening).

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