Source: Exame - Print Edition - SP - 20/08/2009

 

Works in Sergipe: the connection with Bahia by the coast was expected decades ago

In view of the mire in which the Brazilian Senate has been sinking in recent weeks, it is natural for hopeless speeches to emerge that everything that originates from politics and governments is bad. The eight pages of this report show that, fortunately, in this case too, one cannot generalize. They reveal an almost unknown and surprisingly positive side within states. Some public managers already measure, compare, analyze, plan and, yes, pursue goals. The report did not seek inspiration from Pollyanna - a character created by the American writer Eleanor Porter in the early 20th century and characterized by looking for a positive side in any and all situations. It is only the record of concrete changes that have occurred in three states in the country: Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and Sergipe. Followers of the examples of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, they are pointed out by specialists in finance and public management as the highlights of a second wave of modernization of state administrations. What they are doing is applying basic management concepts, like keeping accounts up to date, controlling expenses, setting work goals, planning investments aiming results, in short, everything that is widely applied within good companies, but practically unknown in the sector public. In their own way, these states have demonstrated that it is possible to make public management more efficient. Efficiency in these cases is translated in several ways:

• The reinforced paycheck of teacher Marinalda Ramos, 44, who teaches Portuguese at the state school Ageu Magalhães, in Recife. His July salary came with a bonus of R $ 2, paid by the government of Pernambuco to all school employees who reached the performance target set by the Department of Education. The prize ranged from 344 to 250 reais, depending on the employee's salary and the percentage of the target reached in each school, assessed by the students' grades and the number of approved students.

• In the numerous small reductions in expenses in Sergipe, which added savings of R $ 142 million in 2008. The expenditure review helped to carry out works expected for years, such as the recovery of the Rota do Sertão, which cost R $ 50 million . The road connects the capital, Aracaju, to the interior of the state, where one of the largest dairy basins in the Northeast is located and also an area of ​​exuberant natural beauty, the Xingó canyon, practically unknown to tourists.

• In the restructuring of the payments area in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which was “a complete shame”, according to a treasury official, who refuses to identify himself for obvious reasons. Creditors did not know when they would receive and the servers did not know how much they could pay. When invoices arrived at the treasury and found no funds, the push game and phone calls from the supplier to senior government officials began. With the changes completed in 2008, the average payment term fell from 120 to 20 days. Today, suppliers check the payment day on the government's internet portal. “When you pay on time, you attract more and better suppliers and are able to buy better,” says Joaquim Levy, Rio de Janeiro's finance secretary.

Considering the lack of control, and even the neglect, in relation to public money in the country, it is not surprising that one of the first measures of the management improvement works is a good cleaning of expenses. This stage of the work tends to reveal absurdities. In Pernambuco, it was discovered that public hospitals paid tax on the circulation of goods and services in the purchase of all medicines, even those exempt from the tax. Other than that, due to sheer lack of planning, practically all medicine purchases were made on an urgent basis, in small quantities, which made transactions more expensive. The changes in the purchasing process generated an average reduction of 20% in the price of medicines and savings of R $ 25 million in 2008. In all, the comb-fine operation in Pernambuco generated R $ 107 million in savings. Obviously, measures of this type alone do not solve the central problem of the states, which is the scarcity of money to invest in areas such as transport infrastructure, one of the bottlenecks in the country's development. "The great drama is that most of the resources go to the payment of personnel, which creates a straitjacket for governments," says Raul Velloso, a specialist in public finance. “This problem is not resolved overnight, but the improvement in management has to consider it as well.” The first states to start work show that they are on the way. São Paulo cut the proportion of personnel expenses in relation to revenue from 61% to 56,5% from 2002 to 2008. Minas Gerais decreased from 65% to 57% and Espírito Santo from 56% to 46%.

 

Escola de Pernambuco: the transformation goes from roof renovation to teacher bonuses

The reorganization in the states also includes the review of processes that have been repeated inefficiently since always. In Rio de Janeiro, the fact that the patrol of the Military Police was hampered by the poor maintenance of the police fleet resulted in the outsourcing of the service in 2007. The maintenance of the cars was always done in the battalion workshops, exactly as the film portrayed. Elite squad. In fiction, the situation was disheartening: cars fell apart, parts disappeared and you never knew when, and if, they would leave the workshop. “The reality was identical to fiction,” says Roberto Sá, Rio's undersecretary of public security. “Only 3 of our 500 vehicles were working.” In the portion of the fleet that was outsourced, which already totals 10 000 cars, the proportion of stopped vehicles was reduced from 1% to 592%.

So far, the easy part of renovation works in the public sector is located. "The fundamental changes depend on the structuring of a work logic very different from that adopted by public agencies not only in Brazil but in almost the whole world", says the Englishman Michael Barber, coordinator of a team created by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair with the goal of improving government performance in the areas of health, education, crime and transportation. Currently, Barber is a partner at McKinsey strategy consultancy. According to him, it is necessary to define priorities and establish very clear goals of what is intended to be achieved in each area. There is no point in establishing general objectives. It must be said that the priority is education, for example, but also what results must be achieved and in how long. “The third mandatory task is to create a way to monitor the progress of the actions established to reach the goals, preferably every month”, says Barber.

Considering the recommendations of the British consultant, Pernambuco is one of the most advanced states in the second wave of modernization of public management. In 2007, the government established a map with ten strategic objectives, which unfold in more than 400 actions. The atmosphere in the teachers' room at the Ageu Magalhães school, in Recife, visited by EXAME, shows that the new education system is leaving the government offices and reaching the edge, that is, the schools. Director Maria Antônia Lima and professor Marinalda Ramos explain the goal system created by the current government. In July 2007, Maria Antônia participated in a training in which she learned that all schools would be evaluated annually. The first grade of Ageu Magalhães - 2,6 on a scale of 0 to 10 - made the principal participate in another training, whose focus was the elaboration of a plan to improve the school's performance. “Our job is to diagnose, plan, execute and correct”, says Danilo Cabral, Pernambuco's secretary of Education.

At the end of last year, the school scored 3,88 and exceeded the target set by 2011, which earned its employees the bonus paid in July. A few months earlier, the two teachers and the remaining 27 state employees received a brand-new notebook paid for by the government at home. "We cannot deny that we feel more important with this type of recognition", says Marinalda. Another change occurred earlier this year, when Ageu Magalhães became a reference school. As a result, students will remain in the classroom for 000 hours on two days a week, twice the conventional workload. Increasing the load is one of the actions to increase the quality of students' learning. In 9, 2003 schools operated under this system. There are currently 13.

In Espírito Santo, a state that has been modernizing management for a long time, the first three years were dedicated to a fiscal adjustment. It was necessary to revert a critical situation: when he took office in 2003, Governor Paulo Hartung found a gap of 1,2 billion reais in overdue debts, including three arrears. Once this step was over, the government drew up a long-term agenda, with targets for the year 2025. The agenda is composed of 26 priority projects, which guide state investments, leaving 80% of the resources. Each project has a manager who works in partnership with the government's management office, created in 2007 for the general monitoring of initiatives. It is this office that prepares a report called “Deliveries to society”, used to review the strategic plan. 82 deliveries are scheduled for this year, including the recovery of 85 water springs, one of the actions of the Águas Limpas project, aimed at improving basic sanitation. From 2003 to 2008, the proportion of treated sewage in Vitória rose from 35% to 58%. In the state, it went from 20% to 36%. The result was obtained with the construction of 18 treatment plants. Another 15 are to be expanded or built, of which eight are under construction. The goal is that, in 2011, Vitória will be the first Brazilian capital with 100% treated sewage and that Espírito Santo will reach 60% treatment - the average in Brazil is only 30%. The status of each project is monitored by those involved in the work via an intranet. Sometimes, the governor checks information even by cell phone. “Good public management translates into investments that become services and, in turn, change people's reality,” says Governor Hartung, currently in his second term. "And this is only possible with the right methodology and information." In 2008, the Espírito Santo government invested 788 million reais and closed December with 350 million in cash. This year, even with the drop in revenue caused by the crisis, Espírito Santo should invest 1 billion reais.

In terms of monitoring, Pernambuco is once again an example. Every Tuesday, Governor Eduardo Campos participates in two meetings that take him all day, in which he gives a detailed assessment of two of the ten strategic objectives of his government. At the end of five weeks, Campos ends the monitoring of the great strategic goals and, in the following week, it starts all over again. The pace and organization of work is impressive. In one room, called the “control room”, all the secretaries involved in the objective to be examined meet. In the case of the Pact for Life, in the area of ​​public security - which had a review meeting accompanied by the EXAME report -, there are more than two dozen people, including professionals from the Civil and Military police, from the prison system, from the prison administration , the Fire Department and the Public Defender's Office. In addition to them, technicians ensure that there are no flaws in the presentation to the chief, the governor. For 4 hours, those in charge of the goals display slides and more slides on a screen. This is information such as the weekly number of intentional homicides in 77 regions of the state. In the case of works, photos are designed to show where they stand (with date, as required by the governor). Maps with green, yellow and red markings identify the most problematic and the most peaceful regions, including the names of those responsible for each one. “Brazil has already proved that it knows how to collect”, says Eduardo Campos, referring to the efficient collection structures that have technical bodies among the most prepared of the Brazilian bureaucracy. "Now you need to prove that you know how to deliver quality services"

 

Sewage treatment in Espírito Santo: Vitória wants to be the best capital in sanitation 

 
Of course, not all states are at the same level of planning and control. In Sergipe, the system is much less sophisticated. The progress of the work still depends much more on the personal effort of one or another manager, such as Deputy Secretary of the Civil House, Marcos Sales. With the EXAME report, he traveled a stretch of the Rota do Sertão highway, which cuts through the state towards the interior, explaining the quantity and thickness of the concrete used in the work. It talks about the hours savings that the driver will have when the Joel Silveira bridge is ready and, finally, it will allow the connection of Sergipe and Bahia by the coast. Sales also does not refuse to go out of the way to show three Family Health Clinics - a kind of more sophisticated health post -, all with the same construction pattern. There are currently 57 clinics under construction and 45 under bidding. The government's goal is to have at least one in each of the 75 municipalities in Sergipe. “When the network is complete, we will greatly reduce the movement of people to the capital, which will provide more convenience to the population and cut costs for the state”, says Sales, born in Sergipe, but with most of his career in Rio de Janeiro , where he was an executive at Oi-Telemar.

The best part of the story is that there is evidence that the examples reported are not isolated and fleeting initiatives. They reflect a movement that has been spreading across the country and, better than that, regardless of political party. In Pernambuco, the governor is the PSB; in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, the PSDB; in Espírito Santo and Sergipe, PT. Cities such as Porto Alegre, Curitiba and Sorocaba, at the forefront of the public modernization movement at the municipal level, are managed by PMDB and PSDB. Much of these advances were driven by the Competitive Brazil Movement (MBC) - an entity that has been advising and financing the administrative modernization of several states and municipalities. At the MBC annual congress, held in July, in Brasilia, two statements showed that the wave of improvement in public management has been gaining volume. The first was from the governor of Sergipe, Marcelo Deda: “I confess that, when I took office, I was prejudiced against management tools, but today I recognize that they are a great instrument for managing the state. It doesn't matter whether the politician is on the right or the left. The search for efficiency is a democratic cause and in Sergipe it has produced concrete results ”. The second statement came from the founder of MBC, businessman Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter: “If ten years ago someone told me that I would hear this from a left-wing politician, I would have said that the person was crazy. This is a real miracle. They bought the idea of ​​improving management and are benefiting from it. And, above all, the population of your states is winning ”.