As with all evaluations, Legislative Finance Committee staff provided the Department of Game and Fish with ample opportunity to review and provide edits to staff for accuracy and tone before the report, “Program Evaluation: Performance of the Department of Game and Fish,” was published. As with all LFC evaluations, after the informal editing process, should the evaluated department or agency still disagree with staff findings and recommendations, they are provided the opportunity to formally log that disagreement in an official response letter included as part of the LFC report. Game and Fish’s Oct. 27 response begins on page 21 of the LFC report (https://ift.tt/3nLaTW2); however, it includes no mention of inaccuracies. Quite the opposite, the department instead concluded its response letter with this: “Again, thank you for dedicating staff time to evaluating the Department. We very much appreciate the perspective and look forward to continuing to work to better New Mexico.”
In the evaluation report, staff found a need for greater accountability, recommending the department rethink how it shares the outcomes of its work to the Legislature and New Mexicans by reporting who benefits from the state’s elk tag distribution system and more directly showing the actual populations of the wildlife it manages over time by including that data in its formal performance measures. A detailed discussion of the department’s existing reporting to the Legislature is on page 15 of the report. In particular, the report notes there that “direct reporting of the size of big game herds and populations of nonstocked native fish would be a more obvious way of measuring if Game and Fish is accomplishing its mission. The department already must make these population estimates on a semi-regular basis to set hunt levels and make fish stocking decisions.” So, in effect, staff acknowledges in the body of the report that the department is tracking species populations, but oversimplified this fact in the executive summary, noting that “the department does not report on the wild population levels of any of the species it manages.” The more complete version of that sentence would have said that the department does not report on … the species it manages to the Legislature.
Still, the department remained silent on this issue for the entirety of the evaluation process. In fact, the department’s official response noted that it “recognize(s) that the current Performance Measures have remained essentially unchanged since they were developed after the passage of the Accountability in Government Act,” and the department was open to discussions of mutually agreeable measures that might better reflect the work the agency does.
Furthermore, to date, neither my staff nor I have received any additional feedback from the director or his staff regarding the LFC report’s findings or recommendations. Nevertheless, in the spirit of continual improvement of government function, we look forward to working with the Department of Game and Fish collaboratively to address all recommendations agreed on in the report.
Note: Changes to the Full-Text RSS free service
"fish" - Google News
December 23, 2020 at 02:02PM
https://ift.tt/38po6NU
LFC stands by criticism in report on Game and Fish - Albuquerque Journal
"fish" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35JkYuc
https://ift.tt/3feFffJ
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "LFC stands by criticism in report on Game and Fish - Albuquerque Journal"
Post a Comment