LANSING – After former Licensing and Regulatory Affairs Director Steve Arwood left the department last week, Acting Director Mike Zimmer is focusing on the program known as Reinventing Performance in Michigan.

The program has been active for a handful of months and comes as the administration of Governor Rick Snyder wraps up its first term and has heavily pushed reform in this area.

The goal of RPM is to decrease delays and remove duplicative forms or impractical regulations and practices to quite literally make state government more efficient. Zimmer described the concept of RPM as a “team-driven analysis of core processes” to make them more friendly and appealing to the state’s “customers.”

“We do a lot of stuff, but it’s all different stuff that has its own core function. RPM is almost a unifying strategy for the bureau,” Zimmer said. “It’s one thing we can all do: We can all focus on customer service using the same process review.”

Specifically, Zimmer and LARA staff have four main goals for improving business customer-facing requirements and targeted processes within state government: 25 percent improvement in satisfaction with the regulatory process; 50 percent improvement in customer response time; ensuring 100 percent of the customer-facing regulatory materials are utilized and needed; and overall 50 percent reduction in forms.

And already the department has seen success, Zimmer noted. It has improved customers’ perception of the state’s regulatory climate by 24 percent; improved customer response timeliness by cutting processing times by 76 percent; and reduced forms by 51 percent.

“It’s important to eliminate unnecessary un-operative or duplicative, but after that it’s looking for breaks … so the user has predictability,” he said.

Zimmer, who has been with the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs for 14 years and its numerous name changes, said that if he is officially named the head of the department, he doesn’t expect to jump ship to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation within two years like his two predecessors, Arwood and former MEDC Chief Operating Officer Steve Hilfinger.

“I’m a department kind of guy, and my name isn’t Steve,” he joked about the move of both the Steve-named men to the position of COO for the MEDC, one after the other.

Another issue Zimmer said the department is continuing to work on is administrative hearings on rules. In the past, the department has combined administrative hearing functions and so now there is an essential hearing office, he said. By instating a sort of civil procedure for administrative hearings, it increases the predictability and could help to rescind some 500 rules in the process.

Zimmer said he has a long history of public service, starting with being a Senate staffer for 12 years and then becoming director of a previous governor’s office of regulatory reform. In 2000, it transitioned into the Department of Consumer and Industry Services and then the Department of Labor and Economic Growth (which later added the Department of Energy to be known as DELEG).

“Because we did hearings for what is now LARA, I sort of earned a broad appreciation for all our agencies and bureaus,” Zimmer said of that experience.

He has been the chief deputy director since LARA was formed.

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