Who Is Driving the Bus?: One Legislator's Road to Accountability - Tapa blanda

Connecticut State Representative Diana Urban refuses to accept the status quo of incremental budgeting and short-sighted horse-trading. In Who’s Driving the Bus?, Urban leads readers on her journey to Results-Based Accountability (RBA), sharing lessons learned along the way. As Rep. Urban explains, the titular question “encapsulates the attributes—including leadership, purpose and trustworthiness—to which our elected officials should aspire. Just as bus drivers are expected to, at a minimum, deliver us to our destinations safely, it seems reasonable that we should expect as much from our elected representatives.” This book is a refreshing vehicle for distilling pragmatic advice gained from real political experience, while remaining true to core values. Budget oversight, bill markups and appropriations deliberations can be dry, technical, almost academic topics. But in her straight-shooting, colloquial, and at times irreverent tone, Urban presents an engaging narrative for current and aspiring legislators that is interwoven with clear and valuable lessons that they can apply to their own budgeting strategies. She eschews the textbook format typically reserved for books about budget and policy, and instead embraces a personal case study approach that proves remarkably effective as a pedagogical tool. This is not merely a “how to” manual. It’s a companion guide for legislators in which Representative Urban shares some of the personal and professional struggles of adopting RBA in Connecticut’s legislative process. In each chapter, Urban recounts a different phase of her journey—from freshman legislator to co-Chair of the state’s Committee on Children. Her anecdotes paint a picture that most legislators will recognize: forgetting to check on the progress of programs for which she had secured funding in the previous budget cycle; dealing with the bureaucrats at state agencies determined to wait out any new ideas she proposed; encouraging officials from underperforming programs to admit deficiencies without fear of blame. These are some of the difficult challenges that legislators must confront. The path of least resistance is to pass the same budget as one’s predecessors, deliver speeches full of rhetoric, and try not to make waves before the next campaign. But the path to accountability requires that we do better. Skeptics should note that Urban is a credible spokeswoman for both RBA and children’s issues. As co-Chair of the Committee on Children, Representative Urban used RBA methodologies to establish the Connecticut Children’s Report Card—a scorecard that requires every children’s program in the state to report how its funding yields measurable results. The project is still a work in progress, but the public can track its development online at http://www.ctkidsreportcard.org. Using the Children’s Report Card as an example, Urban explains that if state legislators want to achieve their policy goals and budget priorities, they need to be able to answer three fundamental questions of RBA: How much are you doing? How well are you doing it? Is anyone better off? And although she acknowledges that RBA is no panacea, she makes a forceful argument for using the tool to identify programs that deliver results for constituents. The ultimate goal is to employ limited resources more efficiently to achieve measurable improvements that reflect our values and priorities. This book is a great resource and should be read carefully by freshman and senior legislators across the country. As state and local budget constraints have become tighter, we need more elected officials driving down the path to accountability rather than staying on the path of least resistance.

Diana Urban was first elected to the General Assembly November 7, 2000 and is currently serving her fifth term. She is Chair of the Committee on Children as well as Co-Chair of the Results-Based Accountability (RBA) Sub Committee of the Appropriations Committee. She is committed to protecting Connecticut's most vulnerable children and providing ample educational opportunities to all children in this state, recognizing the role they will play in the future. She has been named the Legislator of the Year by the Humane Society of the United States four times. She has also been named a Children’s Champion for four years by the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance. Throughout her tenure in the General Assembly, Representative Urban has led the fight for RBA in Budgeting in the State of Connecticut. She has also been recognized by Governing Magazine as a National Leader in High Performance Government for her work on RBA and recently the NCSL awarded Connecticut the Con Hogan Award for RBA and Work on Innovation in Government. She fervently believes that accountability and transparency are essential to good government. In 2010, she was named Governing magazine’s Public Official of the Year for her work on accountability and budgets. In 2012, she was named to the Hall of Heroes for the Community Indicators Consortium as a leader that has had significant, long-term impact on the indicators field and the improvement of community conditions and well-being.