Good policy fails in bad machinery. A well-funded program run through the wrong agency, a county that can’t act without a bill in Montgomery, a court system paid for by fees on the people it processes: these are not policy disagreements, they are design problems, and they cost Alabamians money and trust regardless of who is in office. 

Alabama’s government is unusually centralized, unusually old in its structure, and unusually hard to see clearly. PARCA’s role is to map how it works, measure how it performs against peers, and lay out the options for making it work better, without prescribing which one to choose.