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Friday, July 28, 2006
Perdue will remake government
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My conservative credentials are in danger of being revoked after I declared publicly last week before the Rotary Club of Marietta that, by one definition, the three greatest governors of my lifetime are Ellis Arnall, Jimmy Carter and Roy Barnes.
In this narrow sense: All exhausted their political capital to bring about bold change in government as they found it —rendering themselves unelectable.
Arnall, governor from 1943-47, is easily the best of the lot. As his biographer, Harold P. Henderson, wrote in his chapter of “Georgia Governors in an Age of Change,” Arnall was an ambitious reformer. Those reforms included a new state constitution, a constitutional Board of Regents, state Board of Education and state Board of Pardons and Paroles. He abolished the poll tax, lowered the voting age to 18, created the Georgia Ports Authority, instituted a state merit system and liquidated state debt without raising taxes.
Carter’s accomplishments are less sweeping, but his reorganization of state government in an effort to make it more coherent and efficient was a high-risk, high-cost effort that consumed all of his political capital. Though governors then were limited to one term, it was just as well. He could not have been re-elected.
Barnes, on regional transportation, education and water, thought big — not on most in ways that would appeal to conservatives. But the standard for me for any mayor, county commission chairman, governor or key legislator is this:
What did the leader do to use the power and money available to fix the problems he inherited?
For Arnall, it was creating modern government. For Carter, it was tackling the special-interest protected fiefdoms. For Barnes, it was configuring government regionally.
Comes now Sonny Perdue.
In ways that have the dramatic potential of Georgia’s most ambitious governors, Perdue’s New Georgia Commission promises to revolutionize state government.
What Arnall and Carter did was to look at the Rube Goldberg contraption that state government had become, recognize its inherent unsuitability for the demands to come and retool it. That is Perdue’s New Georgia Commission.
The commission, headed by Joe W. Rogers Jr., the Waffle House CEO, and Robert Hatcher, the Georgia chairman of BB&T bank, is a group of business folks who meet periodically to look at how state government does business. Their recommendations are handed over to veteran department head Lonice Barrett for research and implementation.
It’s not uncommon for governors to appoint commissions to look at government redundancies and inefficiencies, have them write reports and then shelve them. They are typically launched in a down economy and discarded when the good times roll again.
Not so with this one. A couple of examples:
The state’s construction manual, which informs engineers, builders, architects and others how to proceed, hasn’t been updated since 1954. During that time, various contracting agencies wrote their own rules. “Literally, every state agency was running their construction projects a little bit differently,” says Gena Abraham, director of the Georgia Building Authority.
The state builds to the tune of about $1.1 billion a year. She estimates that standardization of procedures will save taxpayers 1-2 percent per year.
Another example, from her domain, is identifying and managing state property. Just as the state had no idea how many cars it owned, it had no precise inventory of its buildings and property or of its leases. State officials thought we owned 12,000 facilities. As of Thursday, 16,000 had been identified. Abraham’s guess is that we’ll end up with 17,000 — all of them compiled and listed for public inspection on a state database (www.realpropropertiesgeorgia.org) .
Now it’s tracking down, county by county, every piece of property the state owns.
Leases have been consolidated, too. On Friday, Perdue dedicated a “one-stop shop” of consolidated offices in Douglasville, the first of others to come that take separate leases and combine them into one.
This particular office, combining child support recovery, probation and paroles in one facility, is expected to save $150,000 per year in rental and maintenance fees. Consolidating them statewide is estimated to save up to $875 million over 10 years.
Arnall modernized the structure. Carter modernized the boxes. Perdue is modernizing management.
Dull, yes. But absolutely essential for the future.
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