GETTING YOUR MONEY'S WORTH ON TAXES COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS AIMED AT IMPROVING EFFICIENCY.

Byline: Jennifer Openshaw

WHEN you walk into a fast-food restaurant, you know how much you are going pay and - thanks to government regulations - what you are going to get, down to each and every calorie.

But what do you get for your money at the DMV or the Department of Education? You pay taxes at the gas pump, at the checkout stand and out of your paycheck. But do you know where your tax money is going and whether you are getting your money's worth?

A big part of California's budget crisis is the result of spending more money on a large number of important public services than the state collects in taxes. But the other side of the coin is that California's budget - and the management of public programs - is not based on measurable performance.

For sure, many public employees are working hard and making life better for the state's residents. State programs shield us from harm, educate our children, care for seniors and protect our environment.

But the state does not have a thoughtful and public way to establish priorities, and many programs do not have clear goals or any standards to judge their performance. While significant efforts have been made to improve accountability, particularly in education, most state programs are not assessed based on their outcomes.

Hopefully, once the $15 billion bailout bond issue is behind us, the governor and legislators will have some breathing room to turn their attention to producing leaner, more effective state services. Here are three ideas to put on the griddle from the state's independent Little Hoover Commission:

--The prison and parole system. Some 70 percent of 125,000 inmates released from prison each year violate their parole and are returned to prison. California spends $28,000 per year for each inmate kept in prison. That means we're spending nearly $1 billion a year recycling parole violators, only to release them again after a few more months behind bars.

Virtually every other state in the nation does a better job of establishing parolees back into their communities and reducing the crimes they commit. Two immediate ways to save $450 million per year without jeopardizing public safety:

1. Reduce the length of revocation sentences for certain offenders from an average of 140 days to 100 days.

2. Implement a series of community-based interventions for the large percentage of parole violators returned to prison for drug use and possession, including more frequent testing and outpatient treatment.

--Foster care. Few jobs in state government are more important than ensuring the safety and well-being of the some 100,000 abused and neglected children in foster care. More than $2 billion is spent on this system each year- or roughly $24,000 per foster child.

How many taxpayers spend $24,000 a year on their children who are under 18? But despite this enormous investment, some kids still end up in dangerous homes and are not receiving basic education and health care that they are entitled to under the law. No one is taking responsibility for this failure, and no one is being held accountable.

As a first step, the commission recommends a performance-based management structure focused on reducing the time children spend in the costly foster care system solely because the bureaucracy is not responding to the needs of a struggling family.

--Drug and alcohol addiction. According to Columbia University, the state spends about $11 billion each year responding to the problem of drug and alcohol abuse - through law enforcement, the courts, health care, foster care and drug treatment. But the state is not coordinating those efforts to use the right tool at the right time and in the right way to reduce the scourge of drug abuse.

The commission recommends ways to allocate dollars more strategically between law enforcement and drug treatment that, if followed, would reduce crime, violence and other harmful consequences of drug abuse. Even improving the performance of these programs marginally could reduce public costs by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Much of the debate over the state's fiscal crisis has focused on some combination of budget cuts or tax increases. Only recently has there been some interest in increasing the performance of public programs. However, the long-term answer must include a concerted, public and evidence-based way of improving the focus, performance and accountability of state programs.

If we have learned one other thing in recent years, it should be that government works best with robust public involvement. We all live up to our expectations, and our expectations for government should be that we know what we are getting, and we are getting our money's worth.