The black eyes for the State of New York simply do not end. Most dysfunctional legislature in the country? Check. Losing Congressional seats because of relative population decline? Check. An economic performance that trails the rest of the nation significantly, and upstate, catastrophically? Check.

Now, Governing Magazine has ranked the fifty states in order of efficiency. On the standard grade-school scale, New York comes in at a B-, just a tad lower than the national average. Among the states that beat us in terms of effective governance?

Louisiana. They got a B. Freaking Louisiana.

Some high points:

Budget negotiation became an object of statewide ridicule after 20 budgets in a row failed to meet the annual statutory deadline, mostly because the three individuals who made the decisions — the Senate and Assembly leaders and the governor — had trouble coming to any consensus. A barrage of scorn from the media and citizens finally shamed the leadership into meeting a schedule in each of the past three years. The progress, however, has been more cosmetic than real. Last year, the budget was issued within a few hours of the deadline, but few legislators and virtually no citizens got a chance to read it. Factors such as the actual effectiveness of state programs weren't considered in the debate.

Dust and ashes, but not everywhere.

Of particular note is momentum coming from the Office for Technology and its newly created Department of Performance Management and Process Improvement. A wide range of stakeholders are now consulted about the state's strategic direction in technology through workshops and interviews, and an online "wiki" tool is being developed to solicit input from the public. The Office for Technology is aggressively overseeing adherence to service-level agreements with agencies, and pushing them to monitor a wide range of IT-related performance measures. Those metrics will soon be electronically accessible across state government, and some of them will be made public. A logical next step, of course, would be adapting that practice to track key statewide metrics unrelated to IT.

But still, Louisiana - and a bunch of other states - are better and more effectively governed than we are.

Does that put Joe Bruno's perma-hissy-fit about Eliot Spitzer and holding the Senate into perspective? Sure it does. Griping about mean people ain't going to fix the state, people.

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