Bucking the outsourcing movement

Construction is humming along at the Goose Creek Correctional Center out at Point MacKenzie. Every week it looks more and more complete.

For a lot of Mat-Su residents, government types, mostly, the prison represents a rare partnership between the Mat-Su Borough and the state. For others, it represents well-paying local jobs in a community populated mostly with people who work elsewhere.

In another way, the correctional center represents a small failure for outsourcing.

The most recent pronouncement from the state is that housing inmates at Point MacKenzie rather than at a private prison in Colorado will cost the state more. This does not surprise us. Were the Colorado prison more expensive, the outcry from the Legislature would have been hard to miss.

Despite the cost, the state wants to move ahead with bringing those inmates home. Rehabilitating offenders in Alaska, where they feel at home in the landscape and culture of the place and are close to whatever support they had prior to their offenses, makes sense. And the state obviously thinks the benefits outweigh the costs.

Another failure of outsourcing came last year when the borough school board rescinded its contract with NANA Management, the company with which it had contracted to keep its schools clean.

The contract had been a thorn in the district’s side for three years. Those who were laid off or saw their pay slashed didn’t forget the school board’s decision. Neither did their supporters. They kept the pressure up and finally got their way.

Again, contracting for janitorial work was cheaper than doing it in-house. But the community seemed to agree that was not how they wanted their school system to operate.

What is instructive about both of these case studies is that we as a state and as a borough seem to have reached a limit to how many private hands will dip into the government’s business.

We might be in the minority on this one.

According to an online report on CNNMoney, the city of Maywood, Calif., has outsourced its entire city government — police officers, parks officials, everyone — after being dropped by its insurance carrier. The report doesn’t detail a whole lot of outrage coming from Maywood’s residents, but does seem to imply that municipalities nationwide are looking at outsourcing as a way of coping with the country’s recession.

Whether that trend extends to Alaska remains to be seen. Like any complex issue, it’s hard to take a bold stand on outsourcing.

There are plenty examples of outsourcing done well and plenty where it has been done poorly.

A good example of outsourcing done right is in the construction trades. We can’t even imagine what an in-house road and building construction department would look like. The private sector has proved itself more than capable of providing those services for the government.

So what we hope is that if any of our municipal governments decide to flirt with outsourcing, that it will think long and hard before making any bold moves. We don’t need it to turn out the way the NANA contract did.