GOP gubernatorial hopeful Charlie Baker has listed repealing the Pacheco Law as one of his “Baker’s Dozen” proposals for reducing public sector costs.
The Boston Globe has editorialzed against the law as “wasteful policy,” as has Globe columnist Scot Lehigh, who has made the Pacheco Law almost as frequent a target of his displeasure as teachers’ unions. Lehigh has termed the law a:”misguided statute that effectively ended the state’s experiment with hiring private-sector firms to deliver public services.”
Lehigh goes on to contend that: “With Pacheco on the books, it’s difficult even to explore the efficiencies that could come from contracting out, much less realize them.”
The pro-privatization think tank, The Pioneer Institute, which Baker co-directed in the late 1980s, has termed the Pacheco Law “the most restrictive state anti-privatization legislation in the nation.” A separate paper, written by the equally pro-privatization Reason Institute and published by the Pioneer Institute, claims that as a result of the Pacheco Law, Massachusetts is: “…the only state in the nation that has virtually outlawed the privatization of public services.”
Strong words. But like many of the negative claims about the Pacheco Law noted above, the Reason/Pioneer claim doesn’t appear to be backed up by convincing evidence. For instance, in discussing the amount of privatization that Massachusetts has supposedly been “missing out on” due to the Pacheco Law, the Reason/Pioneer paper cites a statistic from the Government Contracting Institute that the value of federal, state, and local contracts to private firms around the country increased by 65 percent between 1996 and 2002. The paper, however, doesn’t provide any evidence that Massachusetts failed to keep up with that increase in contracting.
No doubt, the Pacheco Law has some provisions that can be argued are unfair to would-be contractors. There may be good arguments for changing some of those provisions, such as one giving the auditor the power to reject a proposed contract he determines not to be “in the public interest,” without providing a definition or reason. It might also be worth considering an appeal process from the auditor’s decisions.
At the same time, however, it is unclear that the Pacheco Law has really done much to block either privatization or the closures of state-run facilities in Massachusetts. In fact, a case could be made that the Pacheco Law has been underutilized by those who might have used it to slow the rate of facility closures and privatization in the state.
Interestingly, the law was enacted in during a battle in the early 1990s over the then Weld administration’s plans to close nine state-run mental health, mental retardation, and public health institutions. Yet, passage of the law didn’t stop the closures of any of those facilities, particularly the Dever Developmental Center, which was in Pacheco’s own district. The planned closure of Dever had been the impetus for Pacheco’s proposed law.
As Daryl Cameron Every, an attorney who fought to preserve the Dever Center in the 1990s pointed out, the Weld administration avoided a Pacheco-Law review in that case after reaching an agreement with state employee unions to create a network of state-operated group homes to accomodate most of the Dever Center residents. Every said she believes the state will eventually privatize those group homes. As she noted, the Pacheco Law doesn’t obligate the state to continue running the residences.
Today, the Pacheco Law has similarly had no discernible impact on the Patrick administration’s plans to close an additional four state facilities for persons with developmental disabilities, including the Fernald Developmental Center.
There are many ways to get around the Pacheco Law and still effectively terminate or privatize state services. James Durkin, a spokesman for AFSCME Local 93, said that the law won’t necessarily apply if a state facility, such as Fernald, is simply closed. If the privatization process occurs over time, as is likely to be the case with the closure of Fernald and the state-operated residences following the closure of Dever, the Pacheco Law isn’t likley to be invoked, he said.
Durkin added that the Pacheco Law only applies to the privatization of existing state services. When the Massachusetts College of Art recently built a new dormitory and hired private vendors to provide services there, the Pacheco Law didn’t apply, he said.
In addition, contracts under $500,000 in value are exempt from the Pacheco Law. That threshold was raised from $200,000 to $500,000 last year. Durkin said AFSCME considers the various ways around the Pacheco Law, including the $500,000 threshold amount, to be “unfortunate loopholes.” Apparently that threshold isn’t high enough and those loopholes aren’t wide enough for the law’s critics.
Glen Brierre, a spokesman for State Auditor Joseph DeNucci’s Office, said the auditor has approved about 20 proposed contracts since the Pacheco Law went into effect. The “vast majority” of proposals have been approved, he said.
By the way, it’s not as if the Pacheco Law came out of thin air. The Pioneer/Reason paper acknowledges that the law was modeled after a federal rule for contracting out governmental functions (the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-76). The Pioneer/Reason paper contends that the Pacheco Law made significant changes to the federal guidelines, although it doesn’t specify what those changes were.
The OMB Circular states that governmental “commercial activities (i.e. those activities eligible for privatization) should be subject to the forces of competition.” Specifically, it says that competition should determine whether “government personnel should perform a commercial activity.” In other words, like the Pacheco Law, the OMB requires a cost analysis in which government gets to compete with the private sector for the business.
Suffice it to say, the competitive contracting-out process in OMB Circular A-76 is extremely complex (just take a few moments to scroll through the Circular in the link above to appreciate that complexity for yourself), and we’re not in a position to judge exactly how the Pacheco Law differs from the federal model. But then again, we’d doubt that many of the critics of the Pacheco Law are either.
It seems to us that to the extent the Pacheco Law requires a thoughtful review of the costs and claims of privatization in Massachusetts, it should stay on the books.
I don’t know anything about the complexity or requirements of this law but it seems from this post there are plenty of ways around it. The proposed feasibility study relative to closing developmental centers seems to be in line with this law but obviously is being worked around.
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p>Its doesn’t get more obvious that caring for severely mentally retarded, physically disabled and medically fragile people is a whole lot different than contracting “privatizing” the cleaning of public buildings and bus stations. Those pushing for closing these facilities would like you to believe it the same–its not.
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p>There are already numerous services at developmental centers that are “privatized” such as food, laundry, pharmacy and dental. It seems to me that DMR has done a pretty good job privatizing all services that can be privatized with out compromising the quality of care notwithstanding the existence of the Pacheco Law. You never hear about these privatized services or the hundred of jobs they create in the private sector. Its just assumed that there are hundreds of government employees performing these tasks. What happens to those private sector jobs when facilities close. Isn’t it counterproductive to reducing unemployment and increasing taxpayer revenue?
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p>What remains “unprivatized” is the long-term, well trained people. Government employees who provide an invaluable service in the quality of life of these severely disabled people at an extremely modest wage. What’s wrong with that? There are plenty of high paid government employees who are expendable but I won’t go into that.
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p>It seems Pacheco is non-existent in the fight for Fernald. Where is the state auditor. If the care of severely disabled isn’t a matter of “public interest” I don’t know what is.
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Is that it was a compromise of a compromise.
The Weld administration claimed that privatization would save 30-40% with no reduction in quality of services. So to be on the safe side, Pacheco et al. wrote the bill requiring a 10% cost reduction with the same or better quality of service. Plenty of room for error in Weld’s calculations.
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p>Being put to the test, and seeing Denucci’s findings that $268 million of their claimed $273 million in savings from various privatization proposals ranged from unsupported to delusional, they got nervous and fought the 10% requirement down to a requirement that a proposal save some money (even a penny would do) and provide the same or better quality service.
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p>So when Charlie starts talking about the Pacheco law, just ask why it’s so hard to find these 30-40% savings. Maybe us mortals just don’t have his unicorn powers.
I would enjoy someone pointing out instances where privatizing public services produced cost reductions while maintaining the same level of service. If the private sector can do things that much more efficiently, there must be dozens of examples.
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p>This law may impede privatization. If it does, maybe that’s because privatization is not a better way to provide services.
there are some things government does better. The care provided at developmental centers is one of those examples. Too bad its being ignored.
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