Last Monday, October 29, 2007, I read the article “Commission finds hundreds of state reports not needed” by Mark Lisheron, posted on Austin American Statesman. Throughout the article, Lisheron mentioned that “Library and Archives Commission thinks some of more than 1,600 reports generated annually or biannually by state agencies are unnecessary.” I think this article is definitely a bell to alarm the state agencies to regulate the amount of reports. As we all know that paper are made from pulp, thousands of unnecessary documents are wasted which will wash out number of national forests generally as well as out state forests particularly. Moreover, this also leads to the extravagance of other expenses such as ink, and full-time employees. According to Michael Heskett, “the state regularly compiled a list of about 400 reports that required to produce. The Commission found more than 1,600…and his team hasn’t found them all.” Most of the reports are superseded, duplicative or not needed as currently required. The problem keeps growing when the number of reporting requirements has been increasing in the past 20 years. On the other hand, the Legislature does not put the effort in eliminating the redundant reports from other offices such as Department of Aging which was no longer existed and the needless of re-creating reports for Texas Workforce Commission. I think this is a very serious situation that needs to be solved as soon as possible because there is no point of encouraging everybody to recycle while the state government could not put themselves into action. However, let’s look at the optimistic side, I hope Haskett will work out this problem within another year as he expects: “we haven’t begun our evaluation yet. But I think we can reach our goal of eliminating the deadwood without compromising the need for accountability in our state agencies.”
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/10/29/1029reports.html
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Commenting on a colleague’s article, I to believe that there are many unneeded and wasted documents within our state system. Recycling and going green should be all our concern besides just our local activist. Our government should set an example on how to save and help the environment by limiting there documents, which the majority of them seems to be unnecessary, shown by Hesketts in the Statesman article. I agree with my colleague and glad that she was able to find this article. This article showed us that we are not the only ones wasting paper, and that sometimes we have to find answer to our problems within our system. Every little bit helps. Sometimes it is hard to see problems until its’ pointed out to you. Now that we are aware and so are the people who work for the government, hopefully there will be some changes. The saying going “green” isn’t just applying to cars and gas. It applies to everything we do. From a light switch to papers used by the government. I hope that everyone gets to read and comment my classmates article because it is something we should all know a little about.
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