Love the outcome or hate it, the legislative session has ended and this year's discussion about cutting vs. taxing is over. The state budget will be balanced.

Over the short term, cutting and taxing are the only options, since both can be done quickly. Long term, debate limited to cutting or taxing will destroy Minnesota. We rely on a high-value public sector to offset the disadvantages of our cold, remote location.

So the job now is to get beyond cutting and taxing.

How? Start by challenging the conventional assumption about "public services." The notion is of a large box. Inside is "the way things are done." Into a hopper on top we pour resources: money, talent, time. Turn the crank and out come results. "That's it," we're told. Put in less, you'll get out less. If you want more out, you have to put more in. The way of doing things doesn't change.

Except, now it has to. Professional services are expensive as "the way to get things done." So long as we think of meeting needs only as "delivering service," we'll have budget crises endlessly. And Minnesota isn't rich enough to solve all budget crises just with "revenue" solutions. We must find other ways.

Are there ways to do more, less expensively? There are. During the 1970s, Minnesota found many ways. Legislators explored why it cost so much to run Minneapolis and St. Paul. Gov. Rudy Perpich worked to improve productivity in state services. The Public Service Options project worked on redesign with the Urban Institute and with Rand Corp.; and with SRI International on "nonservice" alternatives.

This strategy isn't easy to implement. Powerful forces tell public officials the answer to every need is professional service or some big machine. That's where the money is made — not in "alternatives" or in productivity. But the public sector, like the private, has to be effective and careful about costs; it needs to innovate. With good leadership, it can.

LESS AND MORE

The "how" involves doing more:

Prevention — "Health care" is the big opportunity. We don't insure or buy health; we buy medical-hospital services. These neither cure nor prevent the major, chronic health problems: Cancer, heart disease and diabetes are caused by smoking, drinking, bad diet and lack of exercise. Like the problems, the answers lie in people's behavior. It will take time for prevention to pay off — as in reducing smoking. But prevention is the alternative, if medical-hospital services are not to eat up all growth.

"Load-shedding" — Sometimes we can do less. What if young people learned faster, and moved into work or college at 16? Multiplying $10,000 (the cost of a year of high school) by 150,000 (the number of juniors and seniors today) produces a number legislators might think about.

Supported self-help — Few of us can afford gardeners, chauffeurs or cooks. We use do-it-yourself systems. Someone sells us the equipment, materials, designs and training; we put in the labor. For simple things, this replaces expensive domestic service. Might technology help redesign school into a supported self-help system for students?

Mutual help — People have always taken care of each other in families and neighborhoods: they watch property; teach kids to drive; braid hair; counsel and advise. But professional groups, guarding their market share, try to make this illegal for people who don't have "credentials."

Substitution — Come downscale from the most expensive solutions. Use hospice care rather than hospital care; melt snow rather than plow snow; get better maintenance to defer expensive replacements. Low-capital rather than high-capital solutions.

Utilization — Make full use of professionals' time. Volunteer firefighters work during the day and fight fires when fires happen. In full-time departments, firefighters use their non-fire-fighting time making emergency medical runs.

Volunteering — Pick up litter along the highways, read to little kids, help in hospitals, libraries and museums.

Contracting — Buy service — competitively — from both governmental and nongovernmental organizations that might do things differently, less expensively, better. Contracted services are public services. Minnesota's Joint Powers law holds huge possibilities, permitting two governmental units to do together what either can do separately.

CHANGE THE RULES

So there are ways to "do more with less." How, then, do we get our public sector to move?

Change the rules of the game — Give organizations incentives: reasons and opportunities to change. That beats exhorting them to "do better" or change leadership. Organizations behave the way they are structured and rewarded to behave.

Change their financing — Rather than appropriate money to organizations, run money directly to consumers. Hennepin County did this in the 1980s with child day care. Rather than contract with centers, the county gave families a voucher to buy care.

Introduce options — Give citizens/consumers "free choice of vendor" — again, as Hennepin County did with child care. Many families prefer "family." Family care is less expensive than center care. So more children could be served.

Price services — Require those who can pay to do so; help those who can't.

Capitate producers — Give organizations a lump sum; let them keep what they don't spend. When schools pay for electricity and can keep for school activities whatever they save, energy bills go down. When our Legislature let suburbs "at the end of the bus line" keep the revenue from the Twin Cities transit tax, they redesigned service to meet local needs.

Decentralize — Delegate decision-making to front-line units better able to know what users need. Set general objectives for schools, say; let them decide how students will learn.

BUT IT'S HARD

Happily, when you understand a policy field you usually see possibilities for redesign. Unhappily, it's hard work to develop that understanding; it takes time. Who will do that, and finance that?

The "redesign" response can come partly inside government. But much will be done outside government, by community institutions. Business used to finance this work but now does less with civic affairs. The foundations will be key — especially the community foundations, Minneapolis and St. Paul. They recently made a start at redesign, as in the 1970s the Bush and McKnight foundations financed Public Service Options. This needs to be expanded and sustained.

Government needs to organize itself to respond. Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature could revive state planning and its briefings for legislators, and could create interim study groups to listen to redesign proposals.

This is a national problem. California, for example, is a mess. Minnesota could show the country the way forward.

AN ALLEY-PLOWING EXAMPLE

St. Paul has some history of using alternatives to centralized public services.

One winter when I lived in Minneapolis, snowed in with my alley unplowed, I began dialing at random into St. Paul neighborhoods. People told me: Sure, my alley is plowed.

I learned how alley plowing works in St. Paul. People who live along the alley hire someone with a plow on the front of his 4 x 4, and pay him a fixed amount to come through after every significant snowfall.

It's a kind of community purchase-of-service, outside government. I asked George Latimer once, when he was mayor, how snow gets out of St. Paul alleys. "Damned if I know," he said.

Ted Kolderie is a senior associate with Education|Evolving. His e-mail address is ted@educationevolving.org.