Funding of Constitutional Officers - Virginia Joint Legislative Audit ...

expertise, level of automation, nature of work, population served, duties performed
and support by the locality. These differences simply do not allow anyone formula to
address the multiple variances found in the 640 constitutional offices across the
Commonwealth."
The Compensation Board appears to overstate the differences between offices,
and does not recognize that most ofthe functions performed by the officers are set out
in statute. Nonetheless, JLARC staff agree that there is some variation across the
offices, and that the task of allocating positions to the offices is therefore complex.
JLARC staff disagree with the Compensation Board on the relative potential for
staffing standards, as compared to subjective decision-making, to address this complex
task.
The Compensation Board's position appears to be rooted in a very narrow
view of what the staffing standards can include. For example, the Compensation
Board response argues against a reliance on staffing standards by arguing against the
use of"any one formula" to address the differences between offices. However, there is
no arbitrary limit on the number of factors that can be tested or taken into account
using staffing standards. For example, for clerks of court, the staffing standards
developed by JLARC staff do not consist of "anyone formula," but four pages of
formulas that reflect research conducted on the effects of 24 different factors on
staffing, conducted within 13 different service categories and for four different clusters
ofoffices based on locality size. And there is always room to test additional factors, and
to include new factors in the standards that are supported by the data.
The Compensation Board response does discuss some factors, such as the
existence of local funding for positions, that may affect State decision-making on the
allocation ofpositions but are outside ofthe scope of staffing standards. Although the
Compensation Board response does not make the point, it should be made clear that
the Compensation Board could also specify the criteria that would be used for making
adjustments to the numbers produced by the standards, instead of using subjective
case-by-case judgement.
It COMMONWEALTH'S ATTORNEY STAFFING
The Compensation Board critiques the JLARC analysis of Commonwealth's
attorneys, stating: the "analysis uses population and Uniform Crime Index statistics to
project caseload. However, the Uniform Crime Index is a very poor means ofcomparing
caseload in a prosecutor's office."
The JLARC analysis does not project caseload through the use ofpopulation
and the crime index. Regression analysis was employed in the study to examine the
relationship between workload indicators and how much time is spent performing
various services in Commonwealth's attorney offices. In this analysis, the staffs
finding was that a relationship exists between per capita stafftime spent on prosecution
and both the local crime rate and local population as an economy of scale factor.
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