Bringing Balance to Southwest Ohio: The other 32 million

Bringing Balance to Southwest Ohio: The other 32 million

Containing Costs the IT Way

Governments are in financial crisis, Ohio included. Simply put, we have run out of money. Tax revenues  have dropped as property values have tanked and household incomes dwindled. Falling prices for stocks and real estate have further injured previously underfunded public pension plans. Unemployed workers have increased the demand for welfare and Medicaid services. This year, Ohio faces a 300 million dollar shortfall in its budget and unlike the Feds, we don't have the luxury of printing dollar bills and living on credit. Our state leaders must find practical ways to aggressively cut waste and make the government that we have "lean and mean." One of the best ways to do this is through Internet Technology (IT). Below is an interview with my husband, Chris Howard, addressing this issue. We hear a lot of emotional rhetoric from partisan and nonpartisan groups. Now let's starting talking REAL solutions.

Tell me briefly about your job

I am a Chief of Research at Gartner, a technology research and advisory firm. I am responsible for setting and executing a high-value research agenda for technology professionals within the public and private sectors. In my job, I travel extensively worldwide and interact with clients at all levels of leadership. I have worked with various levels of government in North America and Europe.

What are the common differences you see between private companies and government agencies? Why do those differences exist? Are there differences in management and employee mindsets? Do you approach these groups differently?

Public and private sector organizations have different primary drivers and motivators. Whereas profit and competitiveness are primary for most companies, cost containment and accountability are crucial for government. In a sense, they both have similar stakeholder responsibilities: corporation to its shareholders (and others); government to the citizens. The essence of the difference is that corporations exist to generate wealth. Governments exist to govern.

Governments and corporations both consume information technology (IT). Over the past several decades, each have spent billions adding software, hardware, networks, data centers, and staff to create and support the IT environment. The result for each is a complex, expensive, poorly-understood collection of equipment and functionality where money can leak out in a torrent. The growth of the IT environment should be controlled by effective standards and vendor management policies. Unfortunately, and this is especially true in governments, standards often don’t exist or are not enforced. As a result, complexity compounds, fragmented contracts add cost, and change becomes more difficult to implement. Uncontrolled complexity creates additional cost and this, ironically, is an internal governance issue.

In IT, there are a handful of mindsets, common in both public and private sectors. Some people are constantly curious and always learning: searching for better ways to craft solutions. Others are what we call “lifers”: people who attach themselves to a particular technology or system and ride it out into retirement. Lifers are resistant to change because they perceive it as a threat. Those who remain open and curious are more likely to embrace change but are also more likely to take maverick steps that require management support and intervention.

Another similarity between corporations and governments is the often fractured nature of business lines/agencies. In large organizations, silos develop that are aligned with lines of business, product, services, or some other function. As a result, you may have multiple groups that are doing very similar things, but collaboration is limited and difficult. The more fractured the environment, the harder it will be to effectively serve the needs of the customer/citizen.

Provide examples of ways that you were able to help a government body save money.

In my work as an advisor, I help executives spot the opportunities for consolidation in their environment and counsel them on dealing with political issues that will arise. At the end of the day, the discussion is not about technology solutions: those are pretty straightforward. Most inertia in organizations is caused by culture, habits, and broken relationships.

Most governments worldwide, at all levels, are working on shared-services solutions that consolidate common functions across agencies. This involves reaching consensus on what can be made common and reusable. It is complex work, and requires analysis of existing workflows to determine where redundancies can be collapsed. It is a balancing act: not everything should be centralized, and agencies need some level of autonomy to be effective.

Computing infrastructures are also candidates for consolidation. Using new virtualization technologies and emerging cloud computing capabilities, governments can reduce their spending on data centers. Some of my government clients are making decisions about whether to build new data centers or retrofit their existing ones. In many cases, older government facilities are not appropriate for new data center architectures and they should build a modern facility that incorporates new approaches to power, heating, and cooling. In the long run, such a facility will save them money. In the near term, governments should start by reducing the number of physical servers and replacing them with virtual machines running in their existing data centers.

Consolidation and computing infrastructures come together in effective ways. The Canadian Federal Government, for example, built a completely virtualized infrastructure for shared services that supports most agencies. Virtualization allows for quick provisioning of computing power at lower cost than traditional methods. In this scenario, everyone wins: standards and policies mandate use of the shared infrastructure, turn-around time for new functionality is accelerated, and cost (and technology sprawl) is contained.

Why is the move to e-government just a surface solution?

E-government is an important strategy. It places more control in the hands of the citizen as they interact with their information and services. It also potentially reduces “customer service” costs and personnel. The challenge with e-government is that it may not go deep enough. Truly effective e-government requires refactoring of the underlying systems to create integration and consolidation. Most of these legacy systems were put in place before the concept of citizen self-service (or the internet for that matter) existed. Human workflow will also need to be refactored to support a more integrated environment.

Why I Will Vote Pro-Life

  If elected as your state representative, I will vote “pro-life” on all issues involving abortion. I have held pro-life views for the majority of my lifetime. As a child growing up in the Catholic Church, I was taught that a human being becomes viable at the moment of conception. This stance was reinforced when I became pregnant with our two children in my twenties. I recall the “flutter” of movement that I felt when carrying each of our children in my first trimester. There was no doubt in my mind that such movement indicated God-given life. 

My pro-life stance loosened in my thirties, however, as my work in local juvenile courts tested my convictions. As an attorney and guardian ad litem, I was exposed to many real-life tragedies in which young women found themselves facing unwanted pregnancies. Some of these cases involved rape, incest, or drug addicted mothers who continued to abuse substances while pregnant. For a few years, I embraced a broader approach to abortion because I saw, firsthand, the painful nature of these sad and complicated situations. Did this belief sit well with me? Never.

In recent years, my husband and I have returned to the church and the abortion issue has continued to trouble me. I now believe that as Christians, we must err on the side of caution and protect unborn life in the womb at all costs, even if the infant will be born with serious disabilities, or into situations involving drugs, poverty, abuse and neglect; even if it is a hardship for the mother to carry that child to full-term (unless the mother's life is at risk.) My renewed conviction regarding the sacredness of life at all levels is strengthened by my work on Ohio’s Board of Nursing Home Examiners (BENHA), and Warren County’s National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Both organizations seek to protect the rights of vulnerable individuals regardless of age or physical/mental status.   

As a Christian and a Pro-Life Democrat, I will put my energies into honoring and enhancing the private and public systems that support women and children. I would like for the voter to understand that I have internally struggled with this issue in the past. Nevertheless, my return to the pro-life position that I held for the majority of my lifetime is permanent.

I welcome your response to this blog.

Save our Public Schools!

I've been knocking on a lot of voters' doors in recent weeks. There is always that awkward moment when the homeowner is thinking, "Is she a Jehova's Witness?" The potential voter is relieved when I hand them my card and say that I am running for State Representative in November. "So what are the issues that you are most concerned about?" I ask. Often, the answer involves public school education. Families and teachers want more funding for our local schools. Older folks on fixed incomes are fearful that property taxes will be raised in pursuit of that goal.

In 1996, the Ohio Supreme Court decided that the current method of funding by relying heavily on local property taxes was inequitable (see DeRolph v. State of Ohio). Simply put, the schools in Mason prospered and the schools in downtown Cincinnati suffered when relying on property taxes. Although the Court ordered that Ohio's government "enact a constitutional school-funding system", it did not provide any concrete guidance on how the legislature was to enact such tax reform. Our elected leaders were then faced with a quagmire similar to the oil spill in the Gulf. To correct the problem required a total overhaul of the system. Politicians run from that kind of task. Obvious solutions involve raising income taxes and tangible property taxes on the local electorate, thereby committing political suicide.

Consequently, the legislature took the easy way out and authorized more state funds to schools; a band-aid solution that could not last in the face of a subsequent "Great Recession" and present-day cutbacks in state and federal funding. So now we are faced with a harsh reality. How do we run our schools with diminishing revenues, especially when local levies like the one in Little Miami fail? At this point, my fingers take a long pause on the keyboard.

As your elected State Representative, I will encourage the passage of local levies; better schools increase our property values and make for stronger communities. However, I will not vote for increases in property, income, or tangible taxes without majority consent. People are strapped and struggling to pay their monthly bills and the unemployment rate remains high. We all need to find ways to reduce school spending without raising taxes. First, I will fight to eliminate the requirement of full-day Kindergarten as set forth in House Bill 1. Most local voters agree that this is an indulgent mandate given the limited finances of our public schools. Moreover, there is no strong data to show that all-day Kindergarten is worth the astronomical expense involved in increasing operating costs, staffing, and support staff. Presently, Mason and Lebanon have been granted a one-year waiver of this requirement. However, the full-day Kindergarten mandate should be done away with altogether. It's great in theory, but we just can't afford it.

Our local schools also need to get creative with cutting back on staff through attrition. In Mason, the attrition rate averages 25-35 staff members yearly. By not adding new teachers to replace the ones that leave, it is estimated that over 69 million dollars will be saved in Mason City schools alone in the next 10 years.  
This will obviously put a burden on the teachers that remain, especially in light of the 19-1 student-teacher classroom ratio required in House Bill 1. Nevertheless, we are living in tough financial times and these types of cutbacks are inevitable unless the public wants to pay more in taxes.

Schools can also continue to make cuts in nonessentials like paper costs. By using electronic worksheets and  report cards, large amounts of money can be saved. Similarly, reduced energy consumption in our schools will lead to significant savings, as will a freeze in all funding for extracurricular activities. Other initiatives include a workers' compensation discount program, and cooperative purchasing agreements.    


I am opposed to excessive legislation being placed on top of our local school systems at the whim of the government. An example is Senate Bill 210, intended to fight childhood obesity by requiring 30 minutes of physical activity per day for students in K-12. It's great in theory, don't get me wrong. But our schools don't have the monies to employ the require certified teachers to oversee the programs.


Unfortunately, the proposals referenced above don't come close to solving the dilemma of decreasing revenues and increasing student population faced by the communities in the 67th District.  When all is said and done, we need to increase tax revenues by attracting more lucrative industry to our area. Governor Strickland and the Ohio legislature endeavor to make Ohio the bell weather state for renewable energy in years to come. Communities in the 67th district need to attract money-making, green industry with more tax incentives. The paradox is that offering tax incentives to such industries will result in adding more money to the tax base than what currently exists. We also need more jobs in Internet Technology and Health Care.

By increasing tax revenues through additional businesses and industry, and aggressively decreasing costs, the communities of the 67th District can improve their public schools. I welcome any ideas from the readers on how to solve the school funding crisis in our district. There is a lot of criticism and attack out there on this issue. Let's talk about SOLUTIONS.

Campaign Kickoff Event in Lebanon: Bring Friends!

Paid for by Friends of Anne K Howard, 12 E Warren St Lebanon OH 45036, Chris Howard Treasurer

Independent Voters Rock!

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of Independent voters in my district. These individuals had a very refreshing approach to politics. They did not adhere to any "party line" just for the sake of sticking with the label. Rather, they thought for themselves and were not afraid to go against the mainstream on issues. They also had a healthy skepticism of the media, and the barrage of emotional messages that come at them 24/7 from various news channels.

What impressed me so much about this group was its desire to vote for the leader, not the label. The individuals had a history of voting for both Republican and Democrat candidates in their respective pasts. They did not get caught up with labels, but took the time to get to know the local leader and what he or she stood for. One woman said that in the last election, she had an Obama sign in her yard right next to a (Republican) Mike Turner sign. She felt that Mike Turner had done a lot for her district and was the best choice at that time. She frankly did not care what her neighbors thought. Now that's the American spirit!



The issues facing our country and our state are often extremely complex. To remain Independent shows a thinking and questioning mind; a person who understands that many issues are not black and white, and cannot be neatly framed in a 30-second sound bite. That person also understands that no one party has all the answers. Moreover, neither party is "the enemy." Both parties are designed to keep our system in balance, and each party has beliefs and ideas that are worthy of respectful consideration.

Just over 20% of Warren County voters call themselves Democrats. Just over 30% call themselves Republicans. About 45% of Warren County voters call themselves Independents. I believe that the Independents will vote me into office in November. I have absolute faith in their ability to see that I am a competent woman who will listen to the people she represents and support legislation that will  bring prosperity and balance to the 67th District. If you know an Independent voter in Warren County, please give them my information. No doubt about it, Independent voters ROCK!

Q and A

Question: Can a Democrat EVER win an election in Warren County?

Answer: With your support, I will be elected on November 2, 2010 for State Representative of the 67th District.

Here’s why I stand a chance:

As a responsible moderate business person in Lebanon, I have a passion for bringing significant job growth to Warren County. This is the ONLY way to increase the tax base. 

The new jobs that must come to District 67 should be in lucrative areas like IT, healthcare, and renewable energy. I hear what the voters are saying: NO new taxes or tax increases! Our home values have plummeted and many of us have experienced job loss, or reduction in income since the recession began. 

Question: Can a Democrat lead District 67 as a fiscal conservative?

Answer: This one will.

House Democrats in the Ohio General Assembly have reduced spending by $4.3 billion over the past three years. A $296 million shortfall is expected in Ohio's mid-year, 2010 budget. This means that deeper budget cuts must occur. Big government does NOT mean better government.  

Question: Does this mean you want to cut out vital services?

Answer: Absolutely not.

By cutting back on government waste and aggressively offering tax incentives for IT and energy-related businesses in the 67th District, we can protect vital services such as desperately needed road repairs, help for the elderly and disabled, and education. A community is only as strong as its middle class and its local industry. More jobs, better jobs = a stronger tax base to fund essential services.  

I cannot win this election without YOUR support. Please contribute as generously as you can to my campaign. To contribute, write check to "Friends of Anne K Howard" and mail to 12 East Warren St., Lebanon, Ohio 45036. Also, I would love to see you at my Campaign Kick-Off Event at Gourmet on Broadway, Saturday, June 5, 2010 at 7PM.