The state controller says California's payroll computer program is so antiquated it would take six months to reconfigure it to change workers' pay.

State personnel officials acknowledge the 70-year-old 10-step hiring system means it can take three years for a qualified applicant to land a state job.

No one even knows how much gasoline is burned up each year by the state's vehicle fleet.

This is apparently one tough state to run.

Even setting aside the frequent, fractious and protracted political squabbles among elected officials – such as the current fight over the budget – state government is riddled with systemic problems.

They range from a personnel system that rewards seniority over competency to piecemeal programs that make it almost impossible to measure how well or badly the programs are doing.

"The overriding problem is that there is no real incentive or focus in state government on the real fundamental question that should be asked of virtually everything the state does, and that is, 'How can we do this better?' " said Jim Mayer, executive director of California Forward, a nonpartisan public policy group that pushes reforms in state government and politics.

"There is not a system in place that says, 'OK, how are you going to do a better job with what you've got?' "

Part of the problem is sheer size. California state government is a massive labyrinth of more than 200,000 employees in more than 4,000 separate job classifications, spread through more than 150 agencies and departments – and that doesn't include the state's university and college systems.

Group gives state a low grade

It's a government so large and disparate in its functions that it's difficult for anyone inside the system to take an outside – or objective – view of things.

But at least one outside group does. For the past decade, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank called the Pew Center for the States has joined forces with a periodical called Governing Magazine to analyze all 50 states in key performance areas and issue report cards on how they measure up.

In this year's assessment, California lagged behind all but nine other states in overall grades, and below more than half the states in all but one category.

Among the 10 most populous states, only Illinois did as poorly as California.

"The state has a history of taking stopgap fiscal actions," the report notes.

"California lacks an overall statewide strategic plan (on infrastructure) … poor technology hampers the ability of the state to produce and track performance information … the state faces significant challenges in recruiting and hiring sufficient high-quality staff for agencies."

The Pew Center's assessment may be intuitive for a lot of Californians.

A survey last month by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 65 percent of those polled think they can trust state government no more than some of the time "to do the right thing."

Sixty percent are convinced state government wastes a lot of tax money.

California government has justified the lack of faith with a long and costly string of program and technology failures.

In the early 1990s, there was the $50 million failure of a database system at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In 2001, there was the $95 million debacle involving Oracle Corp., in which the state bought millions of dollars in software it didn't need.

In a technology-based mess that formally ended in June, it took 20 years – and $1 billion in various penalties – for the state to comply with a federal mandate for a computer system that could accurately track child support payments.

Even seemingly simple tasks become engorged by the government's size and complexity.

Since state vehicles are scattered around 100 different departments, no one keeps track of how much the state is spending on fuel each year – although officials manage to do so in Texas, the nation's next-largest state.

At the Department of Justice, about half of the 5,500 workers use one word processing program, and the other half use another.

Call Steve Wiegand, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1076.