The Ritter administration's release last week of its touted government-efficiency study has left Senate Republican leadership underwhelmed--and asking why the governor spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on a subject that has been "studied to death."

Senate GOP chief Andy McElhany noted how even the governor acknowledged in a commentary in today's Denver Post that the past three governors all carried out similar efficiency reviews.

McElhany said the savings promised by the study's various recommendations are mostly "speculative and long-term." Even if realized, he said, any savings "will pale" next to the cost to taxpayers of the governor's decision last year to let labor unions collectively bargain for state government employees' wages and benefits.   

"This governor seems to prefer studying problems to solving them," McElhany said. "If the governor really wanted to streamline state government, he would start by repealing his executive order caving in to organized labor last fall."

That order will allow unions to do as they have in other states--demand higher pay on behalf of state workers, pushing up payroll costs and inflating the budget, he said. McElhany noted that has been the experience in Washington state after it granted unions collective-bargaining power only a few years.   

Gov. Bill Ritter's Government Efficiency and Management Performance Review, or GEMS, study was approved by the Democrat-controlled 2007 legislature at a cost of $717,000. The study's goal as advertised at the time was to hire consultants to “find areas that can be streamlined, made more efficient and when appropriate, eliminated.”

In his column in today's Post, Ritter acknowledges, "This is not the first Colorado government efficiency report," but claims the 2008 GEM review "builds on all of those efforts." That drew a laugh from McElhany. 

"This study sounds a lot like the reinvention of the reinvention of the reinvention of government," McElhany quipped. "Cutting waste? Improving performance? I thought that is what the governor's budget and policy staff were there to do. All they have to do is crib off of some of the same work that was done by three previous administrations."

McElhany added,  "Keep in mind that none of the savings the governor talks about have actually occurred so far. These are long-run promises, the kind that too many politicians make all the time in the hope that voters will forget."