Earlier this week, Laura Leslie of WRAL put up an article, HERE, reporting on NC-GEAR Director Joe Coletti’s appearance before the NC General Assembly’s joint Program Evaluation Oversight Commission to elaborate on the Interim Report that was published in April.  NC-GEAR is a program initiated and favored by Governor McCrory, and the initial budget was established in last year’s General Assembly session at four million dollars.

A few days after the WRAL article was up, a friend wrote reminding me that, even before I retired from NC state government in 1995, there was a somewhat similar program (known as the Employee Suggestion System) to incentivize state employees into suggesting measures to save state funds.  That program is still around, and it is now known as the NC-Thinks program (I know, so easily parodied).

As my friend pointed out, this would seem to present an obvious case of program duplication that should be reported to the administrators of Governor McCrory’s NC-GEAR program.  So I did.  I went to the website, HERE, clicked on the Great Seal of NC logo, and keyed in the following text:

I am sure that I will not be the first to point this out to you, but there is already a state program that incentivizes state employees to make suggestions to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of state government operations.  The program is NC-Thinks, and it seems to be very similar in concept to Governor McCrory’s NC-GEAR initiative.

However, there is one clear distinction that may prove crucial.  The NC-Thinks programs offers rewards, cash and non-cash, to employees if their suggestions are adopted.  It therefore seems likely that an employee who comes up with a good idea will opt to submit it to NC-Thinks rather than to NC-GEAR.

There is, of course, an obvious solution.  Simply fold the NC-Thinks program into NC-GEAR, particularly the policy of offering rewards (of up to $20,000 cash for a truly blockbuster idea) in order to continue incentivizing employees.

In addition to the elimination of redundancy, there would seem to be another potential advantage to this consolidation.  The NC-Thinks program has been around for a long time (although under different names), so the staffers who currently work on the program may very well have some experience that would prove very useful to the NC-GEAR management.

In the various boxes asking who would be effected by my suggestion, I entered General Government, Citizens and Employees, and Cost Savings.

I followed up by sending an e-mail message to my General Assembly representatives, Representative McElraft and Senator Sanderson, alerting them to my civic-minded act in furtherance of Governor McCrory’s pursuit of state government efficiency.  I now sit back to await my gold star, and to see whether my suggestion is in any way incorporated into NC-GEAR’s final report, due in mid-February.

And by the way, dear reader, if you are also interested in improving the efficiency of NC State Government, this is your opportunity to sound off.