Inventive government ideas win Gladfelter Awards

Ideas ranging from a money-saving way to water an Oshkosh prison garden that helps stock food pantries to providing more chances to register Wisconsin voters won the inaugural Lloyd D. Gladfelter Awards for government efficiency.

For their innovative approaches to government problems, five government workers from around the state won $500 awards in a competition administered by the Department of Political Science.

“These are creative solutions to very real problems. The range of ideas aims to help government work more efficiently, benefit taxpayers, encourage community involvement and promote voter participation,” says Dennis Dresang, a political science professor who sat on the selection committee.

The winners are:

Madison Police Department Lt. Joseph Balles, who created a movement within Dane County law enforcement to develop a database to share information on individuals who have had encounters with the various area police forces. An intergovernmental agreement is being established linking Madison police with 16 other departments to provide governance, funding and operation of this consolidation. To limit hardware costs, the system will be linked to officers’ patrol cars via the existing mobile data radio system.
Jennifer Gonda, fiscal planning specialist for the city of Milwaukee Budget and Policy Division, proposed that state government supplement opportunities to register to vote by allowing, and even encouraging, citizens to register whenever there is face-to-face contact between citizens and state agencies. The federal Help America Vote Act requires states to develop a statewide voter registration database by 2006. Gonda’s approach provides convenient, multiple opportunities to register to vote, and for state and local governments to transfer information to the database.
Ron Konkol, a team leader in employment support systems for the Social Security Administration in Madison, led a team of co-workers to develop a database program called the Modernized Return To Work to process all disability beneficiaries’ work reports. The program replaces a cumbersome and time-consuming review of paperwork for each case. The net savings in processing costs to the Social Security Administration is estimated conservatively at $8.9 million per year.
Gregg Rasske, vocational instructor, Oshkosh Correctional Institution, devised a system to pump water from a prison pond to water flowerbeds and a two-acre vegetable garden that inmates tend and harvest. The garden each year yields more than 25,000 pounds of produce, with half used by the prison kitchen and half going to local food pantries. Rasske calculated the expense of using city water and related costs of the existing system during 20 years to be $114,000, compared to about $7,000 for the pond-pumping system.
Joseph Sommers, director of information systems for the city of Muskego, came up with a way to make the city’s documents more accessible. Sommers scanned all documents dating back to 1964, when Muskego was incorporated, and posted them on the city’s Web site. He also installed software that creates a searchable index, so citizens can obtain related documents simply by entering key words. City officials have observed that they now spend two hours researching a particular subject, compared to two days.

The Lloyd D. Gladfelter Awards, established through a gift from the Milwaukee Foundation Corporation to the UW Foundation, honor public employees whose suggestions to improve federal, state, county or local government have the most merit.

The awards come at a time in which governments have struggled to find creative ways to trim budgets and maintain services in the face of declining tax revenues.

The winners will be recognized at the gala dinner at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 26, marking the 100th anniversary of the Department of Political Science at the Concourse Hotel, 1 W. Dayton St.