The Fiscal Crisis of the States: Lessons for the Future.

• Author: Snell, Ronald K.

The Fiscal Crisis of the States: Lessons for the Future edited by Steven D. Gold, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 1995. 396 pages, $42 hardcover, $19.95 softcover.

Apart from a turnover of party control nothing enlivens a statehouse like a fiscal crisis. And while party revolution is likely, to involve as much undoing as innovation fiscal crises are likely to see programs pruned or axed, accumulated proposals for fiscal reform dusted off, privatization taken seriously, personnel policy shaken up, state-local relations reconsidered and long-term employees invited to retire. A state fiscal crisis has historically been the most likely way to start a general cleaning of state government.

This new book looks at the question of whether all this moving and shaking actually gets rid of cobwebs or only shifts the dust. Gold, well-known to many readers of State Legislatures as an authority on state finances, invited six scholars to report on the progress and resolution of the fiscal crises of the early 1990s in six states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan and Minnesota. He and Sarah Ritchie, both at the Center for the Study of the States in Albany, N.Y., when the book was written, have added several interpretive chapters. Gold is now with the Urban Institute Washington, D.C.

These chapters are important reading for all legislators and staff who are concerned with budgets. They provide a level of detail about state actions that is unavailable from other sources. The best parts of the book are Gold's introductory chapters on state issues, problems, strategies and policy changes in the face of fiscal crisis, and his concluding survey of what the six state case studies show. These provides as good a discussion of state responses to fiscal crisis as could be written in the space that Gold has allowed himself.

The case studies are likely to be of more limited appeal, not for any lack of careful research but from the burden of detail. It is hard for all but a few people in the United States to get very interested in the details of politics in another state. The authors of the case studies clearly had been instructed to focus on analysis, draw conclusions that would be useful to readers nationally, and point up the lessons that Massachusetts or California, for example, have for the other 49 states. Unfortunately the authors let thorough presentation of what happened get in the...