Webinar | June 2015

Performance-Based Budgeting in the SLC States

Sujit CanagaRetna

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, an increasing number of states, including several in the SLC region, are focused on increasing accountability and transparency in the disbursement of taxpayer dollars. In this regard, there is renewed focus in a number of states on enacting budgeting techniques that promote clearly specified outcomes more efficiently and effectively. Performance-based budgeting is one such technique that has emerged as a very viable tool with the focus on outcomes (such as completing highway projects on schedule or improving student performance on statewide assessments) and away from routinely funding government operations on a pro forma basis. As noted by Mississippi Speaker Philip Gunn “[T]he idea is to stop spending on programs that don’t produce results – and, in some in cases, spend more on programs that do produce results.”

This webinar provided an overview of the renewed focus in states across the country on PBB as a budgetary technique alongside presentations from Oklahoma and Mississippi on specific measures initiated in these two states to enhance PBB in their settings.

Presenters

Speaker Pro Tem Greg Snowden, Mississippi
Senator Ron Sharp, Oklahoma
Gary Vanlandingham, Director, Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative, Washington, D.C.

Power Point Slides

SLC Special Series Report | August 2011

Economic Expansion, Energy Independence and Environmental Efficiency: Renewables in the South

Sujit CanagaRetna and Jeremy Williams

This SLC Special Series Report explores efforts initiated by Southern states in recent years to develop the renewable energy sector in the region and an assessment of the economic development, energy and environmental benefits expected to flow from these efforts. The report comprises three parts:

• Part 1 explores the economic development component of the renewable energy sector with details on how the renewable sector could rejuvenate the nation's eroding manufacturing sector and job creation trends (direct, indirect and induced) at both the national and state levels related to the renewable energy sector.
• Part 2 focuses on the energy component and includes details on the status, nationally and regionally, of such renewable components as hydro, solar, wind, biomass and geothermal; renewable portfolio standards and the general move toward renewable sources as a domestic and local source of reliable and sustainable energy; composition of the contemporary energy market; national and regional trends; and, finally, an assessment of the environmental and public health benefits to developing renewable energy.
• Part 3 delves into the SLC state profiles and relies mostly on the responses provided by states to the SLC surveys with such details as financial incentives proffered for energy efficiency at both the residential and commercial levels; energy savings and environmental impacts; financial incentives for renewable energy provided to both attract and/or retain corporations to the different SLC states; and a sampling of the different renewable energy projects either active or pending in the states.

SLC Special Series Report | January 2009

Mortgage Meltdown: The Financial Impact of the Housing Contraction in the Southern Legislative Conference States

Sujit CanagaRetna and Mikko Lindberg

Download this report (PDF)